


Our Version of Events

by whyyesitscar



Category: Glee
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-28
Updated: 2016-10-27
Packaged: 2017-11-27 06:14:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 49,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/658819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whyyesitscar/pseuds/whyyesitscar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>People ask me all the time why I love Santana, but they never ask me how, and I think the how is way more interesting. AU Brittana.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Heaven

**Author's Note:**

> I know albumfics are super cheesy and no one does them anymore, but I really really love them. And so many of these songs scream 'Brittany' to me, and Brittany's POV is pretty much unexplored compared to the amount of Santana-centric fics. So. Here you go. Albumfic set to Emeli Sande's "Our Version of Events", but the US version, so minus "Read All About It Part III" but plus "Wonder" and "Tiger". (There are seriously, like, six thousand versions of this CD out there; I don't understand). Anyway, please enjoy the story and definitely give a listen to the album because all of the songs are super great. I'll be posting every Sunday, if I've planned things correctly.

**1\. Heaven**

_you say that you're away_   
_i try but always break_   
_'cause the day always lasts too long_

“You don’t have to buy your own toilet paper, you know. My parents left me money.”

“I have my own money. I buy my own things with it. It’s not a big deal.”

“Okay, well, it’s not a big deal if you let me buy some, either. I know you send money to your brother and sister. This way you can send more.”

“I don’t need your pity, Brittany.”

“I’m not pitying you; I’m just trying to help. Look, you could bring your siblings here—they could share the guest room; it’s big enough—and then I wouldn’t mind so much if you bought your own toilet paper because that’s kind of a lot.”

“No, thank you.”

“Santana—”

“I have work.”

/

It’s the first thing people ask me when it comes up.

_“Why?”_

It’s a good question. I like that question. I ask it a lot when I’m in college or when people do things that don’t make sense. I want to ask it a lot more than I actually do, most of the time. But people get tired of answering it really quickly. I guess I never really understood that until people never stopped expecting me to answer.

I always tell them the truth but they still don’t seem to accept it. That’s the tiring part. There really isn’t any point to explaining myself when other people won’t listen, especially when it’s such an easy thing to explain.

My answer is as static as their question. _“Why?”_ they always ask me, and I always reply _“Why not?”_

Look, I don’t know a lot of things a lot of the time. But what I do know, I know all of the time, and I know it really well. One of these things that I know is how to tell when someone’s hurting. Not, like, when they’re bleeding or something because anyone can tell that. But when their emotions are going to a million places and none of them are good. I have this extra sense—I call it my heart-sense because I don’t like spiders. It’s like, if anyone within one hundred feet of me has a hurt they can’t fix, I can feel it. And I want to help.

So I guess _why not_ doesn’t really answer the question, which is maybe why people keep asking. But I don’t really know how else to say it so they’ll understand.

She was hurting. I’m Brittany Pierce.

That’s it. That’s the reason why.

* * *

 

When I’m home from college, I help run this dance camp for little kids. I’d rather be choreographing for kids with a little more experience, but I don’t have to pay too much attention this way. And, like, it’s my summer. I don’t need to reinvent the jazz square or anything.

(Except someone totally should because everyone hates the jazz square.)

Anyway, most nights I go grab dinner with some of the other counselors after we finish up. There’s a decent Mexican restaurant across the street that has cheap tacos and margaritas, and sometimes you really need a lot of alcohol after a day with three dozen four-to-seven-year-olds.

But sometimes, when I don’t need liquor—because kids can be the best people you’ll ever find, too—that’s when I go to this little diner and get some hot chocolate. I know; it’s summer and I don’t need to warm myself up or anything. I know it’s the wrong season, but people still eat ice cream in winter, right? So this isn’t any different. I go to a diner and I get hot chocolate and pie. Mostly apple but sometimes one of the cooks has some pumpkin mix saved for me because it’s my favorite.

She was there one night and my heart-sense just started going crazy. I didn’t really want it to because—well, there are different degrees of help that people need. Like, Kurt needed to feel at home with himself so I taught him the “Single Ladies” dance, or how I bought Lord Tubbington that Twelve Steps pamphlet. And then Rachel is pretty much every degree of help at once, so mostly I stay away from her.

Santana, she was just as intense as Rachel. But her intensity was more focused. Rachel kind of just sings out all of her feelings and lets them hang in the air. And they go everywhere and maybe they go into us and we feel them, too. But sometimes they just dissolve into empty space. But Santana, her feelings were scrunched in her eyebrows; they rested in her flushed cheeks and tears that tried not to escape. There was also some feeling in her hair, but most of that was mine. I really wanted to touch it.

Everyone in Lima knows Santana Lopez. We know her because our parents and friends tell us to stay away from her. I don’t think she’s dangerous or slutty like everyone says, because when she was at school with us she wasn’t those things. I guess I never really tried to talk to her because it’s hard to be friends with someone who doesn’t know how to have friends. Besides, she was a year below me and we didn’t cross paths often.

I didn’t want to get the urge to help her because I didn’t think I could keep my distance after that. I like making friends but I don’t like being taken advantage of. Talking with Santana was crossing into seriously dangerous territory.

You know how sometimes you go to eat some Oreos and you grab three out of the package because that’s all you’re limiting yourself to, but then you go back for a fourth later? And you rationalize it by saying that you like to eat things in even numbers or something like that, but you really know that you’re just powerless to resist. You know that, as much as you try not to, you’ll eventually crumble every time.

So I picked up my cocoa and pie and sat across from her.

She glared at me but didn’t say anything so I just waited.

“Can I help you with something?” she finally spat.

“Hi, I’m Brittany Pierce,” I said in lieu of an answer.

“I know that.”

“Okay, well I just wanted to make sure. We’ve never really talked.”

“But you’ve suddenly got the urge to start now?”

“How come you’re alone at a diner so late?”

“How come _you_ are?”

“I like to calm down here sometimes after dance camp.”

“You go to _dance_ camp?” Santana scoffed.

“No, I run one.” Santana swirled a spoon in coffee and nodded absently. “You still haven’t answered my question.”

“Here’s a big surprise: I’m not going to.”

“Well then can I drive you home? It’s pretty dark.”

“I can drive myself.”

I shook my head. “No, you can’t. My car was the only one in the lot when I pulled up.”

Santana rolled her eyes and slid out of the booth. I was pretty sure she invented the idea of the offended slide right then. “Fine,” she agreed. “But only if you don’t try and talk to me.”

“Okay.”

(I broke that promise as soon as she buckled her seatbelt. It was Oreos all over again.

Still, she didn’t try to throw herself out of the car so I didn’t see any reason to shut up.)

“Just up here on the right,” Santana directed, gesturing with a hand.

I crinkled my brows. “You live at a motel?”

“When I book a room in about five minutes, I will.”

“No.”

“I’m sorry?” she huffed.

“I mean, my whole family is gone for the summer and I don’t like being in the house alone. We’ve got a guest room.”

Santana looked down and unlocked her door. “No,” she echoed.

“But—”

“Look, I’ve been through this routine before, okay? People feel sorry for me. They want to help me because they know I’m having a rough time or whatever shit they tell themselves. Everyone knows Santana Lopez and how she’s a social leper, the fucking town weirdo. But they don’t know that she isn’t anybody’s charity case. So, no. No, _thank you_.”

“I don’t know you.”

She stopped fiddling with her seatbelt and looked over at me. “What?”

“I mean, I know _of_ you. But I don’t know you.”

“That should be a reason for you _not_ to help me.”

“You just seem lost,” I shrug. “I don’t know if your life is rough or anything and I don’t know what you need or if you need anything at all. I just thought you might like a friend.”

“People don’t generally want to be friends with me.”

“I’m not really people. Besides, I don’t believe most of what everyone says about you.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah,” I nod. “Like, there’s no way you roundhouse-kicked Finn Hudson in the face, because he’s got a bad case of gigantism and you’re probably too short for the big kid rides at Six Flags.”

“Am not,” she pouted.

But she smiled too, so.

/

It was mostly my fault for getting up and sitting with her.

But it was her fault, too, for getting in my car.

I guess it’s only right that both of us are to blame for this. Seems fitting.

/

She was at my house for two days before she let me talk to her. I mean, sure she’d say hi or something if we passed each other in the hall, but one of us was always at work so that didn’t happen too much. Once she left me a note and a couple bucks when she knew I was going to the store. I got the laundry detergent but I put the money under her pillow. She still hasn’t found it, so I’m pretty sure she won’t be mad.

Anyway, that first Thursday, dance camp let out early and instead of going to a bar or the diner I just went home. Santana was at work until later so I took advantage of the empty house and danced a little. Well, I danced a lot, because I don’t know if I can ever dance and stop after a couple of minutes. It kind of just keeps going until I can’t anymore.

I usually use the guest room because it’s got hardwood floors and the bed folds in, but I didn’t want to mess with Santana’s stuff, so I cleared out the couches and rugs from the living room. I plugged my iPod into my speakers and then I don’t remember much after that. I must have been in a dance trance for a couple of hours because that’s how Santana found me when she came home.

“You’re going to blow your eardrums out with that crap,” she said from the doorway.

“What?” I huffed. I turned off my music and realized I’d been dancing for about four hours. It was only 8:00. “Don’t you have work?”

“Got sent home. Have you eaten?”

“No, I’ve just been—”

“Dancing, right. Well, I ordered too much Chinese food. It’s on the kitchen table.” She crossed her arms and headed up the stairs.

“Don’t you want any?” I called after her.

“Not hungry,” she called back. I heard her door close a moment later.

Half an hour later I had a belly full of fried rice and a head full of questions.

/

(It got easier after that. Sometimes she got me Italian because Chinese food gives me gas.

I left some of my mom’s old records outside of her bedroom door because I saw her eyeing them.

She liked Joni Mitchell and I liked pesto.

We grew.)

* * *

 

It’s been about a week now and I still don’t know much about her. Well, I know little things, like how she takes a shower at the same time every morning even if she doesn’t have work until the afternoon; how she always calls her brother and sister at noon because that’s when they eat lunch; or how she pretty much floats whenever she walks. I thought I had a light step because of all the dancing, but Santana basically doesn’t have any feet, that’s how quiet she is.

I also know that she stays up later than she should and she won’t answer any of my questions, not that I haven’t tried asking. She tells me to stay away whenever I get too nosy, only I don’t think I’m being nosy because they’re questions I would ask anyone. Maybe everyone would be uncomfortable; I don’t know. I just know that I want answers.

I think it has something to do with her dad because I’m pretty sure her mom died a while ago. Car crash or she drowned or something—the details are all fuzzy because I heard it from Noah Puckerman and he doesn’t always tell the truth.

Santana’s kind of like that, except she doesn’t tell me anything.

Some nights, when I can’t sleep, I go downstairs and sit on a loveseat near the window because our backyard is really pretty in the dark. Tonight is one of those nights except I can’t do it because someone’s already taken my spot.

“Couldn’t sleep either, huh?”

Her shoulders jerk, surprised, but she doesn’t turn to face me. “I was just on my way back to bed,” she mumbles.

“Oh. Well, you don’t have to. We could not-sleep together.” I stop and go over my words, realizing what I’ve just said. “I mean, not like that. I’m not very good with words most of the time. I just meant that you could stay here and be awake, is all.”

“I know what you meant.”

“Okay.”

She leans her head against the side of the chair. “Your backyard is really nice with the moonlight.”

“Yeah, it’s really pretty during the day but I like it better at night. You should see it when it snows.”

“Ugh, I hate the snow.”

“Really? I love it. You can make snowmen and have snowball fights even when you’re eighty five. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of it. I think a lot of my favorite memories are snow-memories.” She just kind of hums in response. “So do you like summer then?”

“I don’t really care one way or the other.”

“Oh. Are you okay, Santana?”

“I’m fine,” she mutters, but I can hear the sniffle she tries to hide.

“I can get you a glass of water.”

“Sure. Whatever.”

I get two instead. I’m not really thirsty but sometimes when I cry I need to drink something really badly. Maybe Santana’s like that, too.

She takes it from me with a quiet ‘thanks’ and doesn’t say anything when I sit on the carpet next to her chair.

“My sister’s got this really bright pink snowsuit,” I offer. “She’s had it for years and she won’t get rid of it, even though it’s getting short. She looks like Pepto Bismol when she plays in the snow.”

Santana takes a few big gulps of her water. Maybe she will need the second glass.

“Brittany, can you just…not tell me about your family? I don’t really care.”

“Um, sure, I guess. Sorry.” I can feel my cheeks flush. I’m glad it’s dark.

“No, don’t—shit, don’t apologize,” she says, grunting in frustration. “I didn’t—I mean, I don’t— _fuck_.” She puts her glass of water down on the floor and slams her hands up to her face, pressing her palms into her eyes. I’m off the floor immediately, trying to stop her.

“Santana, don’t—don’t do that,” I whisper as I grab her wrists and gently pry them away. When I finally do, her eyes are squeezed shut and she’s failing to keep the tears in. I sit next to her and rub her back and she immediately presses her head into my shoulder, still crying. “Oh, okay, you’re—it’s okay, Santana. It’s going to be okay.”

“It isn’t,” she sobs. “I haven’t seen them in a week and my aunt won’t tell me anything and they didn’t answer my call today and everything just _sucks_.”

“You mean your brother and sister?” I try to piece together the information she’s giving me, only I’m pretty sure she’s leaving out a few really big chunks. “They’re living with your aunt?”

“Yeah.”

“How come you’re not?”

“She lives a town over.”

“Yeah, but—”

“She’s my mom’s sister, okay?” She says it like it means something, which it probably does to her because she gets all angry. But it doesn’t mean anything to me so I just let it go. “Anyway, it was either her or foster care.”

“Did something happen to your dad?”

Santana lifts her head from my side and scoots as far away from me as she can. “Not yet.”

I shake my head. “I don’t understand.”

“I don’t need you to,” she spits. All traces of tears are gone from her voice.

“I just want to hel—”

“ _Don’t_ ,” she warns. “I don’t need your help. I didn’t ask for your help. Thanks for the water.” She gets up and starts walking away.

“Maybe you could just go home and talk to him. I’m sure he’d understand.”

“You don’t know anything about my life, Brittany!” she suddenly explodes. “You can’t just ask me these kinds of questions and expect me to answer. There are walls people have, okay? And I’ve got the Great fucking Wall of China so just don’t even try. If you want me to go home I can be out of here in the morning.”

“No, please don’t,” I reply quickly. “I don’t want to chase you out if you can’t go to your aunt’s or back home and you have to stay here because otherwise you’ll be on the streets, and it gets cold at night and you’re tiny so you’d get cold faster.” She’s looking at me like she’s stuck in between anger and disbelief, so I stop rambling. “I won’t ask questions,” I promise. “If you want to tell me stuff, then I’ll listen, but please don’t leave.”

Santana nods and scuffles her feet. “Sorry I snapped.”

“It’s okay.”

She finally smiles, even if it is a little one. “You’re supposed to say you’re sorry too, for being so nosy.”

“Oh, right. I totally am.” I give her my biggest grin.

She starts to return it, but then her mouth sets in a thin line and she straightens her back. “Goodnight, Brittany.”

/

She’s gone when I wake up the next morning. I run to her bedroom to check—all of her stuff is still there, so I guess she just had things to do. There’s a note waiting for me on her bed, like she knew I’d be worried or something.

_I chopped some fruit, it’s in the fridge. If you’re up for Mexican food tonight, I like steak tacos._

_—Santana_

I really, really don’t understand this girl.


	2. My Kind of Love

**2\. My Kind of Love  
**

_'cause when you've given up_   
_when no matter what you do it's never good enough_   
_when you never thought that it could ever get this tough_   
_that's when you feel my kind of love_

The thing about living with strangers is you learn a lot about them, but you also learn a lot about yourself. Like, I know how I am when my family’s home because I’ve had years to get used to that. And I know that it’s okay to be annoyed with my sister when she doesn’t close the shower curtain because that leads to mold and my mom is pretty much the biggest mysophobe ever.

(It means she doesn’t like germs. I know people say ‘germophobe’, but that’s really boring and obvious. And besides, ‘mysophobe’ sounds like mice, and my mom doesn’t like those either, so.)

Anyway, I know that sometimes I can yell at my family. Because we all have these stupid little things that we do, and it doesn’t really make sense that uncapped pens make my dad so frustrated, but they do. So we learn to put the caps on and click the point back if it doesn’t have a cap.

But like, I don’t really know what to do around Santana. Because she’s really quiet most of the time and she’s not annoying at all. It’s weird, this arrangement we’ve got, because we both settled into it really quickly. It’s easy to live with her, which makes me wonder why she’s living here at all. Because if she can live easily with me, she can live easily with anyone else. Or maybe that’s the problem: she can live easily with anyone else, but it’s the anyone else that can’t live easily with her. Which makes me sad because I think she’s really lonely, like, all of the time.

I guess I just want to sit and talk with her because I’m a little lonely, too. Sometimes, when I was in high school, I felt like everyone else around me was Tigger and Pooh and Eeyore—bouncing and eating honey and being so sad that they’re funny—and I was Roo, always missing the joke. And I mean, I made a lot of friends and sometimes they would explain. But they were usually jerks about it so I kind of just stopped saying stuff that meant anything. That’s how I know Santana is so lonely. Lonely people, we have a lot we want to say. It’s just that there aren’t too many people who want to listen.

I’d listen all day if Santana would just let me.

That’s what I’m learning every day. Sometimes I like to think about how good Santana and I would be at being not-lonely together.

/

“Do you ever think about how scientists should start looking other places for renewable resources?”

Santana stops chewing her taco and looks at me. “No?”

I dip a chip into some guacamole and crunch it loudly. “Well, like, we’re gonna run out of oil soon and I know there’s electric cars but people really don’t want to plug their cars in and then wait. You know, like if they’re on a road trip or something. And, well, assuming that someone could invent a converter that worked while the car was running, wouldn’t it be cool if we could make cars that ran off of hair or dead skin cells?”

She just keeps staring.

“Because, you know, then you could just scratch your head into a jar or something, and everyone’s full of dandruff in the winter. And our hair doesn’t ever stop growing, so even when you got old you could still run it. Although maybe bald guys would have to get good at making friends.” I crunch another chip. “Wouldn’t that be awesome, though? All the husbands have to rely on their wives to drive and they can only sit in the passenger seat and grump.”

“How do you think of this stuff?” Santana sneers.

I shrug. “I dunno, there’s always hair in the shower drain and it seems like a waste to have it clog up the pipes.”

“You think about renewable resources in the _shower_?”

“Well, sure. I mean, that’s when we’re all surrounded by one, right?” She stares at me some more. “Duh, Santana. Water,” I explain.

(I know she understands because she starts opening and closing her mouth like a fish.

Water.)

“Why, what am I supposed to think about in the shower?” I prompt.

“Duh, Brittany,” she mimics. “Showering.”

I wrinkle my nose. “Thinking about showering is boring, unless you’re with someone else and then I bet you’re not doing a lot of showering anyway.”

“Brittany!”

(First she invents a new way of sliding out of a booth, and now she’s yelling a blush.

What’s that Pocahontas song? Santana’s teaching me things I never knew I never knew.)

“What?” I retort. “We’re adults. I’ve showered with someone else; I’m sure you have, too.”

This time she doesn’t yell the blush. I can see it pulsing in her suddenly-too-thin lips.

“I haven’t, actually,” she mumbles.

“Why not?”

“I don’t usually stick around for the shower.”

“Oh.” Santana has long since stopped eating her taco, but she’s still playing with the bits left on her plate. “Well, that’s okay. That means you’re probably really clean.”

I wink until she smiles.

/

I guess I think about big stuff when I’m doing small things. Things I do every day, that I don’t really need to pay attention to. So when I shower, I think about renewable resources. And when I walk home from Mexican restaurants, I think about the strange girl walking next to me who hasn’t said anything for almost nine minutes. Santana is bigger on the inside than her tiny frame would indicate.

“So what do you think about?” I ask, unable to take the silence anymore.

“Right now I’m thinking that we could be driving.”

“It’s June and it’s only 8:00. These are the kinds of nights that walks were made for.”

“I’m pretty sure our legs are what walks were made for.”

“You’re too literal.” I kick a pebble into her foot and she laughs. “You also didn’t really answer my question.”

“Here’s a big surprise—”

“—you’re not going to?” I finish.

“No, actually,” she answers. “I _am_ going to. That’s why it’s a big surprise, get it?”

I shove her shoulder before I wonder if she’d be okay with that. She only pauses for a moment. “You’re still too literal,” I say to cover up the tension.

“And yet you were expecting sarcasm,” she teases back. “Perhaps you were just too quick to label me.”

This time it’s my turn to pause. I realize she’s right. “Yeah, sorry. I don’t usually do that.”

She kind of just looks at me for a bit. I can feel her staring in that way that you know someone is talking about you, only you hear them just as their conversation is ending and you can’t tell if they were saying bad things. Santana’s looking at me. I just don’t want to turn my head and find out exactly how she’s looking.

“I don’t sleep around that much,” she blurts. “I mean, not as much as I made it sound earlier.”

I wrinkle my brows. “Earlier when?”

“When we were talking about showers. I don’t—well, I’m not Puckerman, I guess is what I mean.”

“Oh. I didn’t think you meant it like that.”

“How did you think I meant it then?”

I shrug. “I don’t know…that you didn’t like to take showers?”

“Well, I guess that’s true, too.” She bends down to pick up a dandelion, and even though people tell me all the time that they’re weeds, they’re still my favorite ones. Santana plays with the petals and I think she should wear yellow more often. “I just—sometimes I want to be somewhere else, you know? Somewhere it’s okay to be lonely.”

“I know what you mean,” I say softly.

Santana rolls her eyes. “We were having a nice conversation, Brittany. Don’t ruin it by patronizing me.”

“I’m not—I really do know what you mean, Santana.”

“Please, you and Miss _I’m so holy_ Quinn Fabray were the biggest things at that shit heap of a school.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be lonely.”

“There are different kinds of lonely, Brittany.”

“So what makes your lonely better than mine?”

She stops and looks through me, like her eyes are bullets and they’re shooting a clean path through my insides. “Do you have parents?” she challenges.

“Yes.”

Santana quirks an eyebrow and turns quickly on her heel. “I win,” she says as she walks inside.

I didn’t even know we were home.

/

I guess Santana was right about one thing. Quinn Fabray was pretty much my only real friend in high school. In college too, but we don’t see each other much except for when we cross paths at the apartment we share. She’s always at coffee shops, holding literature groups and writing a bunch of papers, and I’ve got a bunch of clinical studies to run for my psychology classes, plus I still dance a lot.

Sometimes I think that Quinn and I were made to be really good friends because we balance each other out. She’s really grounded and serious and I’m really not. She’s a cat and I’m an otter. There are times when I get all turned around and Quinn slinks up and guides me back to where I’m supposed to be. And when Quinn enters new waters and isn’t sure how welcoming they are—well, I’ve always been a really good swimmer.

(But it takes Quinn a long time to swim with me, so that’s why Santana is staying with me and not her.)

I really want to ask Quinn for help because I think she would understand Santana a lot. But this thing with Santana is really fragile right now, the kind of tension you feel when you’re trying to thread a needle. One wrong move and you’ve got split ends that won’t go back together no matter how many times you lick it.

My mom tells me a lot that the way I see the world is pretty different. I don’t know if I always agree with her because everyone sees the world differently, so really I’m just the same as everyone else. But most of the time I do think that I feel different than everyone else. I think a lot of people start out feeling indifferent about things. They find a new band, take a new class, meet a new person, and they think they’re starting with a blank slate. They think that not feeling anything bad is the same as being open to feeling anything. But they’re wrong. Starting with a blank slate means loving everyone and everything right off the bat until they give you a reason not to.

So it’s like, I already love Santana. And she’s giving me a lot of reasons to stop.

I just haven’t yet.

/

I’m about to call Quinn because I just need to talk about stuff but she calls me first. If she’s inviting me to another dinner at her house with her sister but without her parents, I think I’m going to wash my hair tonight. For, like, a lot of hours.

“Tell me something, Britt,” she says when I pick up.

“Which one? I know a bunch of somethings.”

“The something that involves you having dinner at a Mexican restaurant tonight.”

Crap.

“I like tacos?” I falter.

“With Santana Lopez?”

“What’s wrong with that?”

I start walking around my house, listening as Quinn tells me exactly what’s wrong with eating food in Santana’s company. This is the part of otters that cats don’t understand because otters actually like other otters. Cats kind of hate everyone. Quinn tells me all about how I don’t need to save anyone else, and I think she might actually be getting jealous. (She had a really hard time with Beth sophomore year. That’s when we became really good friends). She tells me how Santana is really shady; how she’s going to steal from my house so I should lock up my valuables; how I should see if she brings home skeevy guys at night or drugs or something because I swear, Brittany, I saw some white powdered crap drop out of her bag once.

I just walk around and let her talk. The tiles on my floor are spaced perfectly for my stride, so I start walking in patterns. First I walk diagonally, then I walk like a knight moves on a chess board. That one makes me look like a giant smooshing innocent village people (but not the kind with hard hats).

I make it to the far side of the kitchen, the side that connects to the dining room that we never use. There are two armchairs shoved in the far corners that we drag out when company comes over. I can hear Santana’s voice. Quinn doesn’t sound like she’s going to stop talking anytime soon and I don’t think she’ll miss me, so I put my phone on mute and scoot as close to Santana as I can without being seen.

“…you have to help out, Turo. Izzy doesn’t really get what’s going on. No, I know she’s not an idiot. She knows something is wrong; she just doesn’t know what. She’s ten. She doesn’t need to know.” She pauses and I can hear a deep humming on the other end. “I checked on him after work yesterday. Mind your Tía, okay? And if she gets nasty, I’ll punch her. Okay. Love you, too. I’ll come by when I can.”

I prance away from Santana’s corner, leaping quietly upstairs until I get to my room and shut my door. I guess it’s time to un-mute Quinn because I need her help.

“…I don’t know what you’re doing, Britt, but it could get really dangerous and I don’t want you mixed up in, like, Mexican drug cartels. You have this need to help everyone, but some people just aren’t worth it.”

“What does ‘tía’ mean in Spanish?” I interrupt.

“‘Aunt’,” Quinn answers immediately. “Wait, why?”

“Just wondering.”

“Brittany, have you been listening to me?” Quinn huffs.

“Yeah, totally. And I know you have this thing about being careful around people but if I was like that I wouldn’t be friends with you. Do you ever think maybe she’s just a really sad person?”

“Yeah, probably sad about how everyone hates her.”

“I don’t hate her.”

“Brittany…”

“Yeah?”

“Just—be careful.”

“Okay.”

I don’t promise anything more than that. I’d probably break it.

/

By the time I hang up with Quinn, I can hear Santana downstairs, fiddling around with pots and pans. If she wants a home-cooked meal tonight, I hope she plans on making it because the last time I tried to cook I set my soup on fire.

“Hey.”

She doesn’t even flinch at the sound of my voice. “Hi,” she replies over the clack of metal.

“Are you making dinner?”

“Was thinking about it, yeah. We’ve got chicken and pasta.”

“Cool.” I bob my head even though she still has her back to me. “Do you mind if I join you?”

Santana puts down the skillet she had grabbed and turns to face me. “I was thinking about asking you, actually.” Her face tinges red for a second.

“Does that mean there was a chance you would have made dinner in my house and _not_ invited me to eat some?” I tease.

“Well…no,” she grumbles. “I just hate apologizing.”

I sit down at our counter and clasp my hands. She moves so smoothly when she starts cooking. I guess it’s the one dance I haven’t yet mastered. “What are you sorry for?"

“I shouldn’t have snapped at you earlier,” she says. “And I don’t want to actually _say_ the words “I’m sorry”, so I’m making dinner.”

“Awesome,” I grin. “Thanks.”

“No big.”

“Can I ask you for something?”

“A favor?” She looks over her shoulder at me, flicking water on the skillet to check if it’s warm enough. “Now that might be pushing it,” she smiles.

“Not really a favor,” I amend. “More like…a courtesy.”

“Okay.”

“Can you stop lying to me?” This time she pivots fully. I guess the chicken can spare a few seconds of her attention. “I mean, like, I know you’re hurting and stuff. And I know that your mom’s dead, but I also know that you have a dad. So don’t tell me you don’t have parents when what you really mean is that you don’t want to talk about it. You don’t have to push me away, Santana. I can not-talk about things.”

She crosses her arms. “Says the girl bringing up a frustrating conversation.”

“It was only frustrating because you made it that way. I wasn’t trying to _do_ anything, Santana. I’m not like other people.”

“Right, because other people know when to leave me alone.”

“But other people are total assholes.”

“Asshole is a highly subjective word.” She grabs the salt grinder and looks at me before using it. “Salt and pepper?”

I crinkle my nose. “No pepper. It makes the roof of my mouth tickle.”

She nods and sprinkles salt over both pieces of chicken. “So what happens if I lie to you? Are you going to kick me out?”

The sad part is I think she would totally expect me to.

“No,” I say softly. “I just don’t appreciate it. I’m not out to get you, Santana.”

“Not yet,” she quips. I just watch her serve up dinner, and I wait. She finally delivers. “Sorry, that was dumb.”

“It wasn’t—you were just reacting.”

I let her leave a chair between us as we eat. Maybe I don’t know how to leave her alone. But I know when not to push.

“I didn’t use to lie so much,” she offers. “Before my mom died…we were a happy family and everything. I didn’t have a reason to lie.”

“What happened?” I pry.

She eats half of her chicken before she even thinks about answering.

“I was eight,” she finally says. “I was kind of a little shit back then; I got really jealous of my brother when he came around. An adorable toddler taking all the attention away from a spoiled eight-year-old—not a good combination.” She smiles wistfully and it looks so pretty on her that I join her. “Anyway, my parents left my brother at home with a babysitter and took me out for a fun night. We went bowling and my dad had a little _too_ much fun with the pitchers of beer, so my mom offered to drive us home.” Her eyes drop to her plate and her voice loses all feeling, like someone sucked it all out with a turkey baster. “I don’t remember much, but the newspaper article said it was a T-Bone crash to the driver’s side out of nowhere, some fuckhead who ran a red light. I was in the back behind my dad so I wasn’t too hurt but my mom didn’t last very long. Didn’t make the trip to the hospital. My dad went into a funk after that and—well, I’m still waiting for him to get out of it.”

“Is that why you’re here?”

“No, that’s why I’m not at home.” She smiles at my confused expression. “I’m here because you’re weird and you don’t know to stay away from the town loser.”

“I don’t think you’re a loser,” I reassure.

“Well, that makes one of us.”

“Santana?”

“Yeah.”

“You know how you said sometimes you need places where it’s okay to be lonely?”

“Yeah.”

"You can be lonely anywhere you want in this house.”

I wink as I clear her plate, just in case she doesn’t get it.

/

(She gets it.

She gets it about ten minutes after I crawl into bed. She slips in next to me and curls up with her back to mine. She is a lot warmer than I think she wants to be.

When I wake up the next morning, she’s molded to my front like a custom body pillow and I could stand it if she were warmer still.)


	3. Where I Sleep

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All of the movies that Brittany mentions are totally real and totally amazing.

**3\. Where I Sleep**

_see the times are changing, and i'm sure of nothing that i know_  
 _except this is us, this is love, and this is where i'm home_  
 _in a world that's breaking, where nothing is for keeps_  
 _this is us, this is love, and this is where i sleep_

I told Quinn I’d be careful, but I think even then I knew that I didn’t really mean it. Because this is pretty much as close to the opposite of careful as I can get, waking up next to Santana. But I think she needed it, and when people need things that I can give, I’m never going to say no.

Besides, I really like waking up next to Santana. I mean, she’s still sleeping which is okay because that gives me some time to look at her. She must move around a lot in her sleep because she ended up stealing almost all of the covers. They’re all bunched around her middle and her legs are sticking out and her hair is all over her face and it makes me wonder how such a small person can be so rejected.

“Are you staring at me?” Santana mumbles into her pillow.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re the first thing I saw when I woke up and I forgot to look away.”

She smiles and stifles a laugh. “Okay.”

“Besides, you’re really pretty.”

“You’re really weird,” she counters.

“Yeah, people say that a lot.”

Santana finally opens her eyes. “People don’t like weird though, do they?”

I pick a loose thread off my blanket. “Not really.”

“Brittany, you know how you said you weren’t like other people?”

“Yeah,” I nod.

She nods with me. “Me too, okay? I don’t mind weird.”

I smile. “Okay.”

Santana smiles and then rolls onto her back, wiping the sleep out of her face. “What time is it?”

I yawn and look over at my clock. “Ten thirty,” I say. “Guess we slept in.”

“Good thing today’s my day off or I’d be an hour late.” She props herself up on her elbows. Her hair is sticking out all over the place like there are a thousand balloons surrounding her head, all of them full of static. “Do you have dance camp today?”

“Nope. Only four days a week; we get Fridays off.”

She turns to me and raises her eyebrows. “Pancakes?”

/

We end up back at the diner because Santana is apparently bad at breakfast food. I think she just wants to eat food she didn’t make. It always tastes better.

There aren’t a lot of people in here on a Friday, which makes me wonder because it’s summer so why shouldn’t people be getting brunch on a weekday? But I also don’t mind it because Santana still seems jumpy around other people.

“We should probably hit the store later,” Santana says as she pours cream into her coffee. “I used the last of the butter last night.”

“Cool.”

“Do you always do that with your pancakes?” She looks pointedly at my plate, where I’ve drawn syrup-faces on my food.

I look down with her. “Yeah, pretty much.”

“Most people would draw smiley faces.”

I cock my head. “But I’m about to eat them. If someone were about to eat you, would you be smiling?”

It’s only when she blushes that I realize there are different kinds of eating. This time, I blush, too.

“Anyway—” But I don’t get to finish that because my phone starts ringing. I drag it out of my bag and frown. “It’s my mom.”

Santana waves a hand and slides out of her seat. “It’s cool; I’ll go pay.”

I’m about to tell her that I can pay my half but my phone has rung three times already and I only have one more before it goes to voicemail, and I don’t want to make my mom mad.

“Hi, Mom,” I say in a rushed breath.

“There you are, Brittany! I was afraid you weren’t going to pick up. Doing something more important than talking to your mother?”

“What? No, I was just…anyway, how are you? How’s California?”

“It’s great! Alex and Katie are really loving it; just the other day, we…”

I tune her out as I watch Santana pay for our meal. She doesn’t look back at me once, not even when the angry waitress behind the counter looks my way and makes eye contact, glaring. I don’t know why she’s so angry, but Santana is just as angry right back. She hands over her money and grabs the change with tense fingers.

“…I don’t know why you wanted to stay home, Brittany; I’m sure there are lots of dance things you could get involved with here, and it’s so warm and beautiful all the time.”

“Lima is warm in the summer too, Mom. That’s kind of the point. Anyway, I like it here. California’s really big.”

Santana walks back over to me. She shoves her hand in her pockets and rocks on her heels. “Ready to go?” she whispers, and I wince because my mom can hear anything.

“Was that Quinn?” she asks.

“No, Mom,” I sigh. I look at Santana before explaining, and I know by her confused eyebrows that she doesn’t understand the question I can’t ask. “That’s…Sam,” I flounder. “One of the other counselors from dance camp.”

“Oh. Is she new this year?”

Santana snatches my phone before I can lie any more and get us both in trouble. “Hi, Mrs. Pierce,” she says, her voice sugary and dangerous. “This is Santana Lopez. Not _Sam_ , Santana. I’ve got your daughter’s phone because we just got done having a _lovely_ breakfast. I’ve been staying at your house, which is just as lovely, and I know that’s probably not the kind of company you want Brittany to be keeping this summer. Don’t worry; you don’t have to fly back here and protect her from crazy Santana. I’ll clear out by tomorrow.” She hangs up and throws my phone in my lap.

It took her half a second too long to understand the question, and I guess that half second brought her to the completely wrong answer.

“Santana, I—”

“Here’s a tip, Brittany,” she interrupts. “If you want me to stop lying to you, don’t be a dick and lie about me.”

“No, that’s not—”

She just walks away.

When I follow her to the car, I pass the angry waitress only this time she’s smirking.

/

The car ride to the grocery store is too quiet.

I don’t try and say anything because I think she would actually tell me to shut up this time, and I’d let her.

/

She doesn’t get out when I put the car in park, which I guess is her way of letting me talk my way out of things. But I don’t like that because I’ve never been very good at talking.

“I wasn’t trying to lie about you,” I mumble.

Santana unclicks her seatbelt. “Yes, you were. Actually, no—there wasn’t any _try_ about it. You did lie about me.”

“I know, but—” I take a deep breath and start over. “I know what you’re thinking. You probably think that I was ashamed to tell my mom about you or something, but I’m not. So I did lie, but I wasn’t trying to hide you, is what I meant.”

“If you weren’t trying to hide me then why did you lie in the first place?”

I look down and press my fingers against the steering wheel until my knuckles start bending the wrong way. “My mom never says bad stuff about you. Like, Quinn’s mom does sometimes and I know a lot of other parents do, too. But my mom never has, mostly because we don’t really talk about other people, you know? But I just—she might have, if I had given her the chance. So I just decided not to.”

Santana gets out of the car and I hope it’s a good sign that she doesn’t slam the door.

/

The grocery store is quiet when I get inside. Santana is waiting by the doors for me, leaning on a cart.

“I thought we were just here for some butter,” I say.

“I could use a couple thousand pounds of chocolate right now,” she answers.

“Okay.”

It turns out she wasn’t kidding because she empties pretty much the entire candy aisle into the cart. All the fun-size bars, the kind you get at Halloween except this is June so they don’t come in multi-packs so we have to buy a lot more of them. I add some gummy worms into the mix because I really like sour stuff, and it’s fun when the sugar sticks to your fingers.

“You know, that crap kills the enamel on your teeth.”

“Chocolate makes you fat.”

Santana looks at me and shakes her head. “Butter and then we’re out of here.”

I smile and follow her into the next aisle. She grabs a box of butter and drops it into the cart, making sure to avoid breaking any candy. She wheels the cart around in the direction of the checkout lanes, but as soon as she looks up her face goes slack and she starts backing up.

“Santana, what—?”

She doesn’t answer me, just keeps going, so I get behind her and steer, apologizing to everyone we bump into until she clears the aisle and parks the cart off to the side.

“What happened?” But she still won’t say anything. She just stands there and takes deep breaths. I close my fingers around her wrist and swipe my thumb across the back of her hand. “Hey, it’s okay, Santana. It’s just me.”

She closes her eyes and waits.

“I saw my dad,” she finally says. “I don’t—I don’t need to see him until Monday and it just really threw me off.”

“Okay.” I peek my head around the corner, checking to see if he’s still there. I realize a little too late that I don’t know what he looks like, but there’s no one buying butter or eggs anyway so we’re clear. “Well I don’t see him anymore, so let’s just go pay.”

I guess it just isn’t anyone’s lucky day because our checkout guy is Azimio Adams, and by the way Santana stiffens as we get near, she doesn’t like him any more than I do.

He smiles like a bad guy with a bomb and starts scanning our stuff. “Nice to see you, Pierce. Looking good.” He runs his greasy eyes all over Santana. “I’d say the same for you, Lopez, but I can smell the skank from here.”

Santana doesn’t say anything. I know she wants to because that’s exactly the same reason I’m being quiet.

Azimio inspects a bag of Snickers, tossing it in his giant, gross hand. “What’s with all the chocolate? You two weirdos having some girl’s night?” He shakes his head in mock disappointment. “I know you’re dumb, Pierce, but I didn’t think you had it in you to stoop this low.”

“Shut up, Azimio,” Santana grumbles.

“I just gotta wonder what happens to make you two all chummy.” He fakes concern and looks at me, eyes big and anguished. “You be careful, Brittany. I hear this one likes to hit it and quit it. Doesn’t really matter what kind of parts they’ve got.” He breaks the worried façade and laughs. “Aren’t you gonna say something? Hello?” He waves a hand in front of my face. “Damn, that explains it. You’ve gone full retard.”

“Hey, don’t talk about her like that, fuckface,” Santana yells.

“Yeah? What are you gonna do, huh?” he sneers.

Santana crosses her arms and smirks. “I’ll find your manager and get you fired. Have fun explaining that to your parents. Didn’t get into college, couldn’t get a real job, and on top of that, you’re such a loser that Walmart fired you. That’s what happens when you mess with bitches—we take you the _fuck_ down.”

“Yeah? And how long do you think it’ll take for my boss to buy my story? You know, the one that goes, ‘Once upon a time, Santana Lopez was the town slut. And she’s batshit crazy, sir, got her panties all in a bunch because I caught her shoplifting and wouldn’t let her get away with it, even when she offered to blow me. Honest, I was just doing my job.’ You think he’ll believe you over me?”

Santana just swipes her card and throws all our food into a bag.

“Whatever you ladies do tonight, I want a video of it!” he calls as we walk away.

Santana waits until we’re out in the parking lot to say anything.

“Why didn’t you stand up for yourself, Brittany?” I pop the trunk and she throws the groceries in, even though it’s really just one bag and it could fit in the backseat. “How could you let him say that stuff to you?”

“It’s nothing,” I mumble. “Don’t worry about it; he’s said worse.”

“Yeah, well, he shouldn’t,” Santana spits as she slams her door. “I can’t believe you just let him get away with it.”

I blush and duck my head. “I don’t like confrontation. When people start yelling at me I get really confused and I don’t know what to do.”

“So you don’t do anything?”

I shrug. “It’s what people expect me to do. If I don’t say anything, they’ll shut up and maybe they won’t bother me anymore.”

“Doesn’t it bug you that they think bad things about you?”

I look over at her, expecting to see the angry eyes that she saved for Azimio and the waitress, but that’s not what I get. I get big, wet, sad eyes, and the confusion kicks in again. There’s more than one kind of confrontation.

“Doesn’t it bug _you_?”

Santana smiles a little, that kind of not-smile you get when something bad happens that you were expecting to happen, even though you hoped it wouldn’t. “Yeah, but I’m not like you. I’m—”

“Smart?” I finish. “I mean, you knew exactly what to say to Azimio.”

“Just because I say stuff doesn’t mean that it’s smart, or even that it’s the right thing to say. And you’re not dumb.” I watch as her hand flutters in the air, in between the seats, before she finally sets it down on my leg. “I mean it,” she says. “You’re not dumb _at all_ , Brittany.”

I rest my hand on hers. Her skin is soft, like paper that’s been crumpled so much it turned into cotton. “Okay.” I smile so she knows I mean it and I start the car. “I know Azimio was joking, but I have a lot of bad movies at my house and I could eat all of that chocolate right now.”

Santana smiles back. “I could go for a girl’s night.”

It’s a good thing I can drive with my left hand because she grabs my right again and I really don’t want to let go.

/

“When you said bad movies, I thought they were gonna be really sappy chick flicks.”

I break a Kit Kat bar in half. “Please, nothing is worse than a crappy action movie about a giant prehistoric shark. Just wait for the dinosaurs one.”

“You have _more_ of these?” Santana asks through a mouthful of chocolate.

“Oh yeah! _Raptor Island_ , _Mansquito_ , _Piranhaconda_. They’re great.”

“ _Piranhaconda?!_ ” Santana looks at me, eyes wide and mouth hanging open. “No way.”

I nod emphatically. “Way. We’re so watching it next. It has this kind of surfer theme song? It’s great.”

Her laugh is kind of like a song and I’ve always liked music so I miss my phone buzzing at first. But Santana nudges me when it buzzes again. I unlock the screen with a swipe and see that I’ve got some texts from my mom.

 **[From: Mom]** _I can come home in a heartbeat if you need me to, Brittany._

 **[From: Mom]** _Why isn’t Quinn staying with you?_

I glance quickly over to Santana. She’s laughing as the mega shark pops out of the San Francisco Bay and takes a bite out of the Golden Gate Bridge.

 _I’m fine, Mom,_ I say instead of answering.

 **[From: Mom]** _I know you like strays, Brittany, but…_

I roll my eyes. Sometimes my mom and Quinn are scarily alike.

_You sure Quinn isn’t my long-lost-sister from those crazy college days of yours? She said pretty much the same thing as you._

**[From: Mom]** _Maybe that means you should listen to at least one of us, then :)_

_Gross with the smiley face. You text like such a mom._

**[From: Mom]** _Isn’t that how I’m supposed to text?_

_I guess. Anyway, I’m fine. Don’t come back. I promise she’s not, like, a serial killer._

“Secret boyfriend?” Santana prompts, making me jump a little. I almost knock over our chocolate stash.

“No,” I recover. “Just my mom.”

“Oh.” She scoots a little farther away and grabs a huge handful of candy. “Checking up on you, huh?”

“Yeah,” I mumble.

“Listen, I hope I didn’t freak her out earlier. If you want me to, I can—”

“No,” I interrupt. “I want you to stay. Promise.”

Santana smiles like I just told her where I kept my secret collection of Cadbury eggs. “How’d you know that was what I was going to say?”

“I dunno,” I shrug. “Sometimes I think I’m kinda psychic.”

“Really? So what am I thinking right now?”

I look back at the television, watching as American and Japanese scientists try to figure out how to save the world from massive sea creatures. “That the shark is way cooler than the octopus.”

“Ugh, totally. Anything that can eat a plane out of midair totally beats a squid taking out some oil factory.”

I nudge her with my shoulder, listening to the crinkle of a thousand empty candy wrappers underneath both of us.  “I told you these movies were great.”

“No way; these are the lamest things ever,” she says. But she nudges me back and laughs, so.

Neither of us says anything until halfway through _Piranhaconda_ , right around the time everyone figures out that the scientist is an egg-stealing scumbag. I’m almost asleep. It’s barely dinner time but when I spend the day doing mostly nothing, I get tired really quickly.

“Brittany?”

“Hmm?” I murmur.

“Was Azimio always like that? To you, I mean. In high school.”

I sit up and blink my eyes a couple times, forcing myself awake. “Yeah, pretty much. Him and a bunch of other people, I guess.”

She exhales her displeasure like an upset bull. “I can’t believe you just let him say that stuff. I’d be punching his lights out if he said that to me.”

“They’re just words, Santana. They don’t matter that much, especially not from some bozo like him.”

“Words matter a lot,” Santana mumbles. “They matter the most.”

I pause the movie and turn on my side to look at her. It takes her a moment to push all the empty wrappers on the floor and mirror my position. I just wait.

“You should have joined Glee club in high school,” I say. “Words are a lot cooler when you’re singing them instead of just talking.”

“How did you know I can sing?” she smiles.

I smile back. “Because you just asked me that instead of telling me that you couldn’t.”

She laughs and shakes her head. “I don’t know, I seem to remember Glee club was pretty lame. I didn’t exactly need something else to further cement me as an outcast.”

I tuck my hands under my cheek. “But you wouldn’t have been. Glee club—we were weird, yeah, but we were family.”

“I don’t really—” Santana clears her throat. “I’m not good at family.”

“Then that just means you haven’t found the right one.”

“Sounds a lot like you’re trying to fix me, Brittany,” Santana says, squinting her eyes playfully. “I thought you said you wouldn’t do that.”

“I’m not doing anything you’re not letting me do.”

This time the way her eyes narrow isn’t friendly. “Hmm.”

“Can I ask you something, Santana?”

“Depends.”

“I’m not going to ask it until you tell me I can.”

“I’m not going to tell you that you can unless I know what it is.”

“Well that doesn’t seem fair.”

“Tough.”

She looks at me for a long time and her eyes are so sad. It’s like when the old lady leaves the fox in the woods, that’s how Santana looks. Like everything she thought she knew, she doesn’t anymore, because the person that explained everything is gone. It’s then that I know she’s not really going to answer my question, so I might as well ask it anyway.

“How come people don’t like you? You seem really nice to me.”

“I got quiet after my mom died. People don’t like quiet. Whatever; it doesn’t matter.”

“You could have just been loud.” I shrug. “It’s what I did.”

“Yeah? And how well did that work out for you?” She gets up and starts cleaning away the mess we’ve made.

I bend down to help, crumpling wrappers in my fists. “Could you stop acting like I’m attacking you every time I ask a question?”

“Could you stop asking me questions?” she fires back. “I never agreed to therapy. I just needed a fucking roof, okay? So back off.”

“No,” I murmur.

She stands up and puts a hand on her hip. “I’m sorry? _No?_ Where do you get off saying no? You don’t even know me.”

I grab the wastebasket from underneath one of the side tables and she shoves her garbage into it. “You can’t be so closed off all the time, Santana. If you want to be a good big sister, you have to let people help you.”

“ _Don’t_ , Brittany,” Santana warns. “You don’t know anything about my family. You don’t know half the shit I sacrifice for them.”

“Maybe if you told someone, you wouldn’t have to sacrifice so much.”

“I’m done,” she growls as she walks away.

“There are people who want to help you, Santana!” I yell after her. “If you’d let them, maybe you wouldn’t be so lonely all the time!”

/

(She is so lonely, though.

I can tell because this time when she crawls into my bed, she doesn’t even try to stay away. She just curls herself around my back and I pretend not to notice how hot her tears are.

When I said I wanted her to be warmer, this isn’t what I meant at all.)


	4. Wonder

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I almost forgot it was Sunday and therefore time to update this one! Also, everyone please watch the remake of The Wicker Man that Brittany mentions in this chapter because it is cinematic gold.

**4\. Wonder**

_if your heart turns blue, i want you to remember_  
 _this song is for you, and you are full of wonder_

“Is this going to be a thing, then?”

Santana wakes up before me this time. I wonder if she spent as much time staring at me as I did at her. Her drooping eyes tell me probably not; she looks like she could fall back asleep any second. I think I could stare at her like this, too.

I take a deep breath and stretch my toes. “Is what going to be a thing?”

“You know, we argue but then I end up caving because I’m a sad fuck and your bed is really comfy.”

“We could try not arguing,” I tease. “I’m pretty sure my bed is comfy no matter what mood you’re in.”

(I don’t tell her that when you’re in the right kind of mood, it is the comfiest bed in the universe.)

“That isn’t going to happen unless you stop being so nosy.”

“Or unless you stop being so cranky,” I counter.

“Oh, I can’t do that. My default setting is cranky.”

“Santana.”

Her eyes lose their playful twinkle. “I’m serious, Brittany. So I’m a private person. Why do I have to be the one to bend right now?”

“Because, of the two of us, I’m not the sad one.”

“I thought you said you were lonely.”

“Yeah, but—”

“So you’re lonely but you’re happy about it?”

“No, that isn’t—”

“Questions kinda suck, huh?”

“I don’t mind them, really.” She raises her eyebrows but I mean it. There are very few questions that I shy away from. It’s like, I ask so many, I can’t not answer when people return the favor. That would be pretty crappy of me to do.

“So I can ask you anything?”

I burrow my cheek into my pillow. “Pretty much.”

“Okay. Can I ask that this doesn’t become a thing?”

I watch as her finger makes lazy circles on my sheets. She outlines the big purple circles, cuts them in half, splices them into diameters and radii, and I think she might invent new right angles if I watch for long enough.

“What, the arguing part?”

Santana smiles a little bit and her middle finger joins her index and traces a circle from both sides. “Yeah, the arguing part,” she clarifies.

I smile back. “Because I don’t mind the sleeping part. I mean—you know—if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind,” she blushes.

“I didn’t think you did. I’m pretty sure you were staring at me just a few minutes ago.”

She gapes her mouth in mock indignation. “Was not!”

“Did you forget to look away, too? Because that’s understandable.”

“Maybe,” she teases. “You know, maybe you’re really pretty, too,” she admits reluctantly, rolling her eyes.

“Yeah well, maybe you’re really weird,” I grin.

We both look down even though I’m pretty sure we want to keep staring. Well, I do at least.

“What are you doing today?” she asks softly.

I shrug. “I dunno, I think I’m gonna do something with Quinn.” I skip my hands across the sheets and trace her finger with mine. In the blooming light of day, her skin is cool and dry. I run the pad of my finger across her nail; it feels impossibly smooth, like that stuff they use to laminate posters.

“You could come with,” I suggest.

“I could,” she whispers. Then she clears her throat. “I mean, I can’t. I have work.”

“Oh. Well, text me when you’re done or something and we can hang.”

She just nods as I get up. She’s still lying there when I leave ten minutes later.

It makes me smirk a little.

/

On Saturdays, Quinn and I waste a lot of time at the mall. She has a pretty big salt craving, so mostly she eats hot pretzels and I get a bunch of smoothies from the food court. Most of the time we just people-watch, but we’re both too preoccupied to do much watching today.

“Please fill me in on whatever you’re doing, because it is seriously freaking me out,” Quinn says, dipping her pretzel into some mustard.

I shrug and sip on some delicious strawberry-banana smoothie. I know there are tastier flavors, but sometimes you just can’t mess with the classics.

“I’m not doing anything, Quinn. She needed somewhere to stay and I couldn’t say no.”

“What’s wrong with her house? I mean, she _has_ a house, right?”

“Stop, Quinn. You don’t have to be mean. Of course she has a house.”

“Okay. So why isn’t she in it?”

“I don’t know. She’s having some family issues but she won’t tell me about them.”

“Why do you even want her to? Let her stew in her own problems.”

I put my smoothie down on the table and start picking at the lid. “Would you stop being so cruel, please? I mean, you’re like a teen statistic, Quinn. Don’t be so quick to judge her when you’ve already had a kid.”

“That isn’t fair, Britt.”

“Why not? I didn’t say anything offensive. You had a kid. That’s a fact.” Quinn winces anyway. “I’m just saying, whatever idea you think you have of her—it’s probably wrong. No one would look at you now and think that you’re a mother.”

“I’m _not_ a mother,” Quinn protests.

“Yes, you are,” I correct. “But you don’t have to be a bitchy one.”

“Point taken,” Quinn pouts into her pretzel. “Okay, I am genuinely all ears now. Who is this Santana Lopez and what is she doing in your house?”

I cock my head, thinking. “Actually, I don’t really know the answer to either of those questions.”

Quinn frowns. “They were mostly rhetorical; I was only being dramatic. How do you not know the answers?”

“I don’t really need to know them. She isn’t weird or anything.”

“She could be a psychopath for all you know.”

“Sometimes I think that about you.”

Quinn finally cracks, her pretzel forgotten as she takes a moment to laugh. “And here I thought I was the only one.”

(She wants me to think she’s joking, but I know that Quinn finds insanity very easily when things get dark. That’s why I try to be so bright all the time.)

She stands up and cracks her back. “I need another one of these; do you want anything?”

I shake my head. “No, thanks. I still have a bunch of my smoothie left. I’m good.”

“You usually finish those things in five sips.”

“Well, _someone_ kept me talking.”

Quinn rolls her eyes. “Okay, okay. Pretzel time. I’ll be back.”

I watch her walk away. Quinn has a lot of different walks. When she’s flirting with someone, she walks all slow and swirly. If she’s going somewhere she isn’t excited about, she walks really fast with heavy steps. Something about getting it over with quicker, even though I tell her that doesn’t make any sense because it’s just not true. When she walks to class, she usually bumps into a lot of stuff because even though Quinn is a good student, she saves all of her reading for the absolute last minute. I don’t know if she has just a normal walk. Today she walks on the balls of her feet, skipping almost like Disney princesses do when they trail a line of woodland creatures. That’s probably just another personality though. Quinn has a lot of them. Not in, like, a crazy way. Sometimes I just think she becomes all these different Quinns for different people because she’s afraid of how she’d be if there was just one of her. 

“You’re watching me again,” she says as she sits down.

I refocus my eyes. “Sorry.” She bites into her new pretzel, leaving a coat of white dust across her lips. “Cinnamon sugar this time?”

Quinn nods. “I need my sweet too, sometimes.”

“Sometimes? You do this every Saturday.”

“Right, and that’s only one day of the whole week, so it’s only some of the time. Anyway”—she licks her lips and smacks them once before swallowing—“you sure you don’t need me to come save you from the crazy Santana monster?”

“It’s been a week and a half and she hasn’t murdered me yet, so I think I’m good.”

“A week and a half?!” Quinn blurts. She stares at me for a long time, eyebrows raised so high I think they’re actually part of her hairline, and then I see it. The moment she comes to a conclusion I pretty much realized two minutes after Santana moved in. “Oh no, Brittany. Don’t tell me you’re into her.”

“Boy, I could use another smoothie.”

/

(It’s useless, Quinn says.

Santana Lopez doesn’t do relationships, Quinn says.

But she doesn’t know what Santana looks like when she sleeps).

/

Quinn and I are shopping halfheartedly when Santana texts me.

 **[From: Santana]** _I could totally go for some Breadstix. You want?_

I look up at Quinn, who’s rifling through a rack of boring cardigans. “Yuck, those are sweaters for sad people, Quinn. Anyway, wanna go have some dinner?”

She doesn’t look up. “Are you buying?”

“Sure,” I shrug.

“Then count me in.”

 _Totally_ , I text back. _Meet you there in ten_.

Most people would probably ditch one friend for another, especially when these two friends aren’t exactly friendly with each other. But I’ve always thought it’s best to open your mind and invite new people into your life.

Still, I don’t tell Quinn that Santana’s joining us until we’re actually parked outside the restaurant. New people are great, but sometimes you need to be sneaky.

 _I’m here,_ I tell Santana. _P.S. I brought Quinn._

I don’t look at my phone when it buzzes a reply.

“Any reason you’re just sitting in the car?” Quinn asks.

“Um, well, how would you feel if there was a third person at this dinner?”

“What?” It hits her when I smile my sheepish smile. “Brittany…”

“Hey, you know what’s really funny? I’m your ride home. If I had a choice between free food—because remember, I said I’d buy—and walking home, boy I know what I’d pick.”

“You are _so_ going to owe me later.”

“I can accept that.”

/

By the look on Santana’s face when we walk in, I can tell she’s just as excited about dinner as Quinn is. I’d be put off by her surly pout if it didn’t make her lips look totally awesome.

We squeeze into a booth, Quinn and I on one side and Santana on the other.

I clear my throat. “So…Santana, Quinn; Quinn, Santana. I don’t know if you guys ever talked.”

“Not voluntarily,” Quinn says at the same time Santana spits a “ _God_ , no.”

“Okay, awesome.” I clear my throat. “Hey, Santana.”

She stops glaring at Quinn long enough to look at me. “What?”

“No, I was just saying hi,” I smile.

Her eyes are like chocolate medallions and I can pinpoint the moment they start to melt, softening after being left out in the sun too long. “Hi,” she echoes. She doesn’t sound mean at all, and my smile widens until it hurts my face and Quinn has to elbow me a little.

Sometimes, magic starts with a bang. It’s right in your face and it doesn’t give you any time to think about it, to try and work through the illusion until you expose its reality. But most of the time, magic is slow and seeping. It works itself under your skin, into your blood, traveling intravenously throughout your nervous system until your brain accepts it as fact, and then you don’t have to question it at all.

Dinner with Quinn and Santana is like watching an amateur magician on his first night. He fumbles and it’s awkward, but the intent is so pure and it’s so _there_ that you walk away feeling happy.

/

Santana doesn’t say anything until we drop Quinn back at her house. She waits until Quinn closes her front door and then she climbs in the front seat. She and Quinn had a fight with their eyes over who was going to sit in the back, and I think Santana lost.

“Sorry I kind of sprang that on you,” I say when I start driving again. “But, well, it could have been worse, right? I mean, she could have stabbed you or something.”

“I almost stabbed her once.”

“What? No, you didn’t.”

“Oh yeah, totally did. You were in the bathroom, though.”

She smiles too wide for me to take her seriously.

“You’re such a liar,” I say, shoving her shoulder.

“Hey, eyes on the road, Pierce. Don’t want to ruin an almost-enjoyable evening with a debilitating car crash.”

“It was totally an enjoyable evening. You were just grumpy.”

“I was grumpy because Quinn kept talking shit about me.”

“Quinn was only saying that stuff because you started it.”

“Did not!” she retorts as I pull into my driveway.

“As the only objective bystander in the whole meal, I say you totally started it.” I lock the car and spin the keys on my finger, stuffing them in my pocket with a triumphant smile after a few twirls.

“Oh, like you’re objective,” Santana says as we walk inside. “Quinn’s your best friend. You’re clearly biased.”

“If I _were_ biased, I wouldn’t rule in Quinn’s favor.”

“What?”

“Do you want some ice cream? I think we have mint chocolate chip.”

Santana follows me into the kitchen and I pull out two bowls, even though she never said yes. It’s just one of those nights when you need ice cream. (I give her an extra scoop because she probably needs it more).

“Anyway,” I continue, “it doesn’t matter what Quinn said. I told you, I don’t listen to all that stuff.”

“Really.” Santana takes a big bite and licks her spoon clean. “With all the shit that people whisper about me, you don’t believe a word of it? You aren’t even a little bit curious?”

“Not really. I mean, it was all dumb stuff. I wouldn’t have believed it no matter who they were talking about.”

“What kind of dumb stuff?” Santana asks.

I feel my cheeks flush and I’m really glad the ice cream is so cold. “No way; I can’t tell you that. That’s like telling your brother about that one time you got off thinking about his girlfriend.”

Santana just stares at me.

“I mean, it’s probably like that. You know, like, hypothetically or something.”

Santana smiles like that cat with all the secrets. “Right, totally hypothetical. That doesn’t let you off the hook though. What kind of stuff?”

I scrape the bottom of my bowl with my spoon, getting the last of the soup my ice cream has become. “I dunno, it was mostly sex stuff,” I admit, my head bowed. “Just boys being gross.”

“Was I any good?” she teases.

“I wouldn’t have slept with you.”

“What? Why not?” She actually sounds offended.

“Well, they made you sound like kind of a skank. Boys tell stories for other boys.”

“Oh.” She avoids meeting my eyes, preferring to tip her bowl back and drain it, the same way I do when I finish a bowl of cereal.

I grab her bowl once she’s done and walk it over to the sink. “Now, if we were going off of the _girls’_ stories…well.” I look up from rinsing and wink.

This time it’s Santana’s turn to blush.

I rejoin her, standing across the counter from her, just watching. She has a dot of white on her nose and it makes me smile. I always like it when people get overzealous with ice cream. It tells me that they know how to have fun, even if—in this case—they probably don’t get too many chances to practice.

“You have some ice cream on your nose,” I giggle.

“What, on the side?” She turns her head expectantly.

“No, the tip. Here.” I tip up on my toes, bending across the counter to wipe it off. The ice cream is cold but so is her nose. I was pretty sure only dogs did that, but I guess not.

It’s more comfortable to stay bent over than it is to go back to standing. Or at least that’s what I’ll tell myself later, when I’m lying in bed and realizing just how impulsive I can be sometimes. Quinn tells me all the time that it’s going to get me in trouble.

I definitely agree with her. It’s just that sometimes trouble is fun.

“So,” she says—breathes, really, and I’m so close I can feel how minty and refreshing it is, “all those rumors and you really didn’t believe any of them?”

“I didn’t believe, but…”

“But?”

Her words are so close I can see them as they come out of her too-touchable mouth.

“Hoped,” I clarify. “A girl can hope.”

A girl can also kiss.

 _Oh,_ a girl can kiss.

/

Kissing Santana is kind of like a revolution. Or maybe it’s a revelation. I always get them confused; they’re both about change so I don’t know why we even need two different words.

Maybe kissing Santana is both. It kind of feels that way—like anarchy, like I’m doing something everyone else tells me I shouldn’t ever do only I can’t stop because I know it’s right. It feels like blinding truth and purple circles, that dizzy feeling you get when you start spinning and you know how bad it would feel if you ever stopped. Kissing Santana is like being on a swing that never stops flipping your stomach and the anticipation gets to you in the best way every time you reach the top of an arc.

Kissing Santana is something I can only describe in pictures and feelings and ideas because she keeps stealing the words right out of my tongue.

“Brittany.”

“You’re not supposed to talk when you’re kissing someone,” I say, breaking away and then immediately going back for seconds or thirds or I forget how many kisses it’s been already. I’ve learned pretty quickly that when it comes to kissing Santana, I will always be greedy.

“You’re also not supposed to put your elbow in a puddle of ice cream,” she rasps back, “but that’s what you’re about to do.”

“What?” She giggles as I look down, and yep, there it is. A circle of melted ice cream just the size of my elbow. It would have been an annoying stain on my shirt, but it definitely was not important enough to interrupt kissing, which I promptly tell her.

“Hey, I’m just saving you laundry detergent, that’s all. You should be thanking me.”

“You should be kissing me.”

“I’ll kiss you when you thank me.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll thank you when you kiss me.”

Santana narrows her eyes playfully and leans closer. “It seems we are at an impasse, then.”

Her voice is so low and tingly I can barely focus. “Okay, so…” I shake my head a little because the tingling is migrating up to her eyes and that’s gonna make me lose. “Movie?” I suggest.

Santana dips her head, as if she were expecting me to say something different. Maybe something better, but she’s still smiling.

“Only if it’s another one of your lame ones.”

“I know the perfect one,” I say, grabbing her hand and leading her to the couch. She sits down but I rifle through my DVD collection, searching. “I think it’s time for my favorite bad movie that actually got a commercial release.”

“There are different categories of bad movies?” Santana laughs from behind me.

“Oh sure,” I say. “There are the classic bad sci-fi movies, old movies that are bad because they’re dated, bad movies that are only funny because of who you watch them with, and then—and these are a guilty pleasure of mine—there are Nicholas Cage movies.” I flourish the DVD case at her as I open it.

“No way,” she protests. “That’s just torture.”

“Is not, I promise. It has overacting and a feminist cult and Nicholas Cage punching old ladies.”

“How is this a real movie?”

“And that’s _before_ the bear suit,” I say, plopping down next to her on the couch.

She gives me a disbelieving look. “Brittany.”

I mimic her tone. “Santana.”

“You’re totally making all of this up.”

“I am totally not!” I insist. “You’ll just have to watch the movie, I guess.”

She makes it about five minutes. I’m impressed; by the way she’s been squirming, I thought she’d give in sooner.

“Britt?”

I try not to smile. “Hm?”

“I promise you I want to watch this movie sometime.”

“But?”

She reaches across me and grabs the remote. Nicholas Cage’s face freezes on my screen in the middle of a stoic breakdown. Or maybe that’s just his face. I think he and Keanu Reeves should team up for some acting lessons.

“But,” she says, her voice tingly again, as she runs a finger up the inside of my arm, “I think right now you have a lot to thank me for.”

“Like what?”

She doesn’t say a word, but her mouth answers me anyway. She gives me a reason to thank her every time she moves her too-soft lips, but I forget all of them a second later because there is one thing better than Santana’s lips and that is Santana’s tongue. It’s short-circuiting my mind from the inside out, so it takes a moment for me to realize that we’re not sitting anymore. Santana’s on top of me and between that, her kisses, and the hand she’s got impossibly tangled in my hair, I don’t know what to feel first.

“We could, um, move to one of the—uh, one of the beds if you want,” I say between kisses.

“Shh.”

“I’m just saying—”

“Brittany.” Santana pulls up and rests her hands on my cheeks, brushing her thumbs under my eyes. It’s so calming and if it were anyone else I might fall asleep, but Santana is too mesmerizing not to look at. “Can we not overthink this? It feels so…nice right now. Can we just have tonight?”

I reach up and run a finger over her bottom lip. It doesn’t seem fair that she’s touching me but I’m not touching her. “What are we having?” I tease.

She blushes and bites her lip. “Brittany…”

“No, I’m serious, Santana. Tonight can be whatever you want, but I just need you to tell me.” My fingers can’t stay confined to her mouth; I watch as they travel the planes of her face—skimming over soft cheeks and her thin nose, smoothing her eyebrows. “You’re so pretty,” I whisper.

Santana smiles softly. “So are you,” she whispers back. “Which is why,” she says, exhaling a deep breath, “we have to stay on the couch.” She averts her eyes, choosing instead to focus on a strand of my hair that she’s twirling. “I’ve, well, I’ve done the bed thing before, and I don’t want to do it to you. Okay?”

I smile and pull her down for a kiss—a slow one, a lazy one, one that says _I’ve done the couch thing before but I think it’ll be new with you._

“Okay.”

The couch normally sags really deep the longer you sit on it, but it’s the comfiest place in the whole house tonight.

I think I’ll chalk that one up to the company.


	5. Mountains

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys are killing me with your responses; thank you so much.

**5\. Mountains  
**

_i know that it's our heart that's gonna save us_   
_if we never come back, how can they blame us?_

“Zombie?”

“A crowbar.”

“You have a crowbar at your house?”

“What, my cousin is over all the time and he’s a bit of a handyman.”

“Hmm. Okay, you get half points for that.”

“I’ll take it.”

“Vampire?”

“Too easy. I have lots of garlic and candles.”

“Okay, werewolf.”

“There’s a reason I always wear my cross necklace—which, I might add, is pure silver.”

“You’re not wearing it now.”

“Well then I guess we’d better hope that your place is werewolf-proof.”

“Do you believe in God?”

“Sometimes.”

“What about ghosts?”

“Do I believe in ghosts? Yes.”

“No, how would you kill them?”

“I wouldn’t. Ghosts aren’t evil. I think they’re just what happens when people get too lost in their own loneliness.”

“I can’t think of any more monsters.”

Santana props her head on her hand and smirks. “Does that mean I win?”

“Yes,” I grin reluctantly. “If we ever get lost in a monster movie, I definitely want to be around you.”

“Awesome. How many points do I have?”

“I forget.”

“Well, that’s no fair. You said I’d get a kiss for every point.”

“I can give you another reason to kiss me.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, because I totally have the cure for ghost-loneliness.”

Santana laughs and scrunches her eyebrows, genuinely confused. “What?”

“You know, because I have magic lips. And if you ever start losing yourself in being alone, you know where to find the cure.”

“You’re the cure for my loneliness?” Santana teases.

“Yeah,” I reply.

“Well, which part of your lips is this cure in—top, bottom, the corners? You know, for future reference.”

“I don’t know,” I wink. “I’ve never had to cure myself. Why don’t you go searching?”

Santana isn’t a particularly good finder, but _boy_ is she a good searcher.

/

“You have dance camp today, right?”

I roll over and look at my alarm clock. “That would be why we’re awake at six in the morning, yes.”

“God,” Santana groans. “Being awake this early in June should be a crime.”

“Does that mean we’d have to be punished?” I smirk. “Because I might be into that.”

Santana raises an eyebrow, smirking right back. “Oh, really? Can I help?”

“That’s what I was hoping,” I say, and I don’t know which of us leaned in first but whoever it was has excellent decision-making skills.

Kissing Santana is the perfect way to wake up but it’s making me sad a little because I wish I would have known her in high school. Maybe she wouldn’t have been so sad; maybe I wouldn’t have felt so out of place. Maybe neither of us would have felt so alone.

“I can hear your brain fizzing,” Santana purrs. “What are you thinking about in there?”

She kisses me between the eyes and I smile. “You. High school. Missed opportunities.”

“That’s some deep thinking for a Monday morning,” she teases.

“You bring it out in me.”

“Among other things; I didn’t know people even made those kinds of noises just from making out.”

“Maybe you’re not making out the right way, then.”

“Oh, I’m doing _something_ right.”

I shove her shoulder because she looks entirely too pleased with herself, but then I have to kiss her nose because, _god_ , she’s unbelievably cute. Santana laughs and leans in for another kiss but I duck my head, preferring instead to play with a strand of her hair.

“Do you think things would be different if we’d talked in high school?” I muse.

“Uh, yeah, I’d have four years of awesome macking memories.”

“I’m serious,” I say, shoving her shoulder again.

Santana rolls away and props her head up on a hand. “Are you asking me if I’d still be messed up?” she challenges.

“Would you?”

“I dunno,” Santana shrugs. “Maybe I’d just have different problems. Life is gonna be full of shit no matter who’s in it.”

“It doesn’t have to be,” I reply. “People make all the difference.”

“Not usually for the better.”

“Then you haven’t met the right people,” I wink.

But Santana doesn’t hear the levity in my tone. “So what if I haven’t?” she fires back, defensive. “That doesn’t make _me_ a terrible person.”

“I never said it did, Santana—”

“I mean, I take care of my dad whenever he’s on a bender and I’m all Arturo and Izzy have. Fuck, I can’t find all the right people because I’m so busy trying to _be_ one, you know?”

“I know, Santana,” I soothe, running a finger up the inside of her arm. “I never said you were a bad person. I think you’re pretty awesome, actually.”

“Sorry,” she mumbles, ducking her head. “I get…well, sorry.”

“It’s okay. C’mere.” I lift up my arm and she tucks under it, nestling her head so far into my shoulder that all I can feel and smell is her hair. (She feels and smells amazing, by the way.) “So, your dad…” I carefully suggest.

“I don’t want to talk about him,” she immediately responds.

“Okay. Well, then tell me about Arturo and Izzy, because I don’t know anything about them except that you love them a lot.”

“I do,” Santana breathes. Her voice hums on my chest, like my skin is a drum whose surface has been stretched so tightly that every tiny sound creates vibrations. “Izzy is a little brat,” she laughs. “She’s my half-sister technically, I guess. My mom died and then my dad remarried, and—well, she didn’t stay but we got Izzy out of it, so I guess that’s okay.”

“How old is she?” I ask, running my fingers through Santana’s hair. It’s morning-rough, like when you wake up after a night of tossing and turning, but it’s still impossibly soft. Santana’s hair feels like Rumpelstiltskin just got done spinning it, only it’s better because black is so much more mysterious than gold.

(Maybe that’s why Santana makes me pause, because I still can’t figure out the mystery of Rumpelstiltskin. People think he was bad, but all bad people have a reason for something. Sometimes that reason is what turns them from bad to troubled, and it’s the second one that can always be fixed.)

“She’s ten,” Santana answers, “and the biggest princess you’ll ever meet. Her room looks like Pepto Bismol and Barbie threw up on the walls.”

“My room totally used to look like that,” I snicker. “Only I had a lot of unicorns, too.”

“Oh, you’re one of _those_ girls, huh?” Santana teases. “Did you have a lot of Lisa Frank notebooks when you were little? Were they covered with all of the pretty, pretty little ponies?”

“Shut up, you probably had skulls and flames all over yours.”

“I did not!” she huffs. “I was _all_ about boy bands and camouflage.”

“Oh, so you were one of _those_ girls,” I echo.

“Jerk,” Santana chuckles.

“What about your brother?” I softly pry.

Santana answers just as quietly. “He’s fifteen,” she says, “and too quiet. More angry than he should be.”

“Why?”

Santana plays with the bit of blanket right above my leg. It bunches in awkward places and she keeps poking it, changing the creases but never letting it settle completely. “He tries to protect me, yells at people who try to start shit. I’ve given up on trying to get them to stop, but Turo, he’s still young enough to get angry. Guess that’s just the story of my life, right?” She laughs, but I don’t think it’s very funny. “The people I love are angry on my behalf and once they start, I can’t make them stop.”

I want to ask her what it means that I’m angry for her, if I still apply to her rule. But maybe that’s something that I’ll save for later when she doesn’t look so sad. It’s never a good idea, mixing sadness and anger. That’s how you lose someone forever.

“It’s not your job to make them stop, Santana. They’re going to feel what they feel.”

“Yeah?” her mouth says. _And what do you feel?_ her eyes say. But I can’t answer that yet, either.

“Yeah,” I say instead. “You don’t need to take on all that responsibility. That’s the kind of thing that drives you crazy, only you still think you’re totally sane. It’s the worst kind of crazy.”

Santana turns her eyes up to me, big and hopeful and scared. “Is there a good kind of crazy?” she asks.

_Me_ , I want to say. But I don’t. Instead I shrug. “I think so. But you’re not going to find it alone.”

She just hums and settles back into me, and we stay like that until I have to get up for work.

Maybe Santana and I can team up for hide and seek, because that was totally my favorite game as a kid. I always wanted to be the seeker because I was really good at sniffing out hiding spots. But it took me so long to figure out which way to go first that people got tired and came out anyway. I knew what to do; I just needed someone to point me, like an arrow.

I think Santana needs direction, too.

Maybe we’re even going the same way.

/

Mike is waiting for me when I get to camp. He goes to college in Chicago but he’s still here every summer, still excited to chaperone little kids. It’s nice to know that some of the things that haven’t changed since high school are good things.

“Good weekend?” he says when I sit across from him at the crappy picnic table. We have to wait here every day until all the kids check in, and then we take a bus to the dance studio. It’s totally inefficient and definitely my favorite part of the day. Kids are meant to run around and be silly outside in the summer.

“Yeah, it was pretty great. Hung out with Quinn…and stuff,” I finish lamely. Mike would be cool about Santana, but it feels nice to keep her mine for now.

“Cool,” he nods.

“You?” I prompt.

“Yeah, Tina and I saw some movies, went mini-golfing.”

“You’re such a twelve-year-old, Mike,” I tease.

“Hey, you can’t mess with the classics, right? Besides, it’s the summer before senior year. I feel like being a kid again.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” I murmur. I prop my head on my fist, watching as the first of our campers makes her way over to our table. Her name is Alex and she’s eight years old and she’s my favorite camper even though she barely says anything. She’s my favorite because she always sits really close to Mike in the mornings and she pulls out a sketchpad and markers right away and just starts drawing.

Sometimes people don’t need words because they think in pictures. I get it.

“Morning, Alex,” I chirp. She’s gotten to the table before her mom, just like she does every morning. Her mom is one of those powerful types—the kind that are executives or saleswomen or ladies from Nordstrom’s, just pretending.

“Hi,” she says quietly, and there’s the sketchpad. But she rifles through her backpack, searching, and I think she’s forgotten her markers.

“Need something to draw with?” I ask. She nods, so I get up with a smile. “It’s cool; we have some markers in the office. I’ll be right back.”

She smiles as I walk away. I watch her mom strike up a conversation with Mike, because all of the moms are a little bit in love with Mike Chang. He’s good-looking and wholesome and he really likes kids. Mike is the kind of man all the moms wish their husbands were.

The markers are all jumbled in a bucket, red caps on green markers and some with no caps at all. I want to organize them but I’d hog them before Alex even got a chance. So I just skip out of the office, lock the door behind me, and smile at the group waiting for me back at the table.

“Here you go, Alex,” I say, placing the bucket in front of her. “Hi, Mrs. Mitchell,” I wave at Alex’s mom.

She nods at me, curt and jerky. “Brittany,” she says icily. Then she leaves.

“Well that was weird,” I frown as she walks away. “Hey, Alex, your mom isn’t possessed by some mean ghost, is she?”

“I don’t think so,” Alex ponders as she draws. “But she was talking to Mrs. Adams a lot last night.”

“Deondre’s mom?” Mike asks.

“Yeah.”

Mike frowns too, mimicking mine. “That doesn’t make any sense.” He looks to me for confirmation but I just look away because it does make sense. It makes too much sense.

Deondre and Alex are good friends. He’s quiet, too; quiet and polite and nothing like his big brother, Azimio.

Dance camp doesn’t really get any less fun than today.

/

It’s the first time I’ve ever wanted to get away from dance camp, but it isn’t for the reasons I think at first. Alex’s mom was the only one who looked at me like I reeked of rotten fish, but it still put me in a mood for the rest of the day. Mike covered for me, diverting kids away from me when I messed up a move or when I just had to take a moment to shake the bad stuff off my shoulders. I think I’ll tell him what’s going on as soon as I figure it out for myself.

So I was looking forward to leaving camp and losing myself in some pumpkin pie. (Because that’s the magic of the universe in summer, right? If you have a bad day in June or July—those days that are supposed to be just because they’re warm and happy and full of hope—the rest of your luck kicks in, and the chef at your diner saves your favorite pie; and you get two free cups of hot chocolate; and it doesn’t rain all night and you pull your sleeping bag onto your roof and get a really good night’s sleep. That’s just the rule of summer, I think).

I guess I thought I was excited to leave because I wanted to get away from something. I just didn’t know I was actually excited because I wanted to get to someone. That’s the second rule of summer—it always tells you things you didn’t know, and they must all be good things because Santana is resting on the hood of my car, glowing against the midafternoon sun. She’s like graham crackers against a fire that turns marshmallows the perfect shade of golden brown.

It’s only when I get closer that I realize her eyes aren’t glowing (they’re like an early morning campfire, fizzing out because someone was too lazy to look after it). But I think I can fix that pretty easily.

“Hey, stranger,” I trill when I get close enough. “Are you working tonight?”

Santana shakes her head and kicks a pebble by her foot. “No, I don’t work Mondays.”

“Oh, okay. Wanna grab some dinner then?”

“Actually, can I take you somewhere?” she asks, lifting her eyes nervously and biting her lip. I think this is what the dictionaries were talking about when they mentioned willpower, because I can resist any food or sex or money. But it’s taking a lot out of me right now not to kiss the sadness out of Santana. Or maybe I’d turn her fizzing into a million sparks and we’d just burn forever.

“Sure,” I nod. “You wanna drive?”

“More than anything,” Santana sighs. She looks like she could kiss me when I toss her the keys.

That’s okay. She can kiss me for whatever reason she wants.

“Did you have a good day?” I ask when she starts driving.

“I’ll tell you when we get there,” she promises. “Quiet until then, okay?”

“Okay,” I smile. I take her hand with both of mine. She grins like she expects me to start playing with it, but I just let it rest in my lap. I can leave playful for the mornings. After a day like today I just need a little bit of comfort, which is why I’m only grabbing her hand. If I wanted _a lot_ a bit of comfort, I’d make Santana pull over.

She finally stops at the base of a hill and, grabbing my hand, pulls me up with her. It isn’t anything special—you can’t see all of Lima and it still isn’t night so there aren’t any stars out. But it’s quiet and it feels safe and Santana is with me, and that’s all I need.

“Did you have a good day?” Santana asks quietly as we lie down on the grass.

“Well, this is the best part of it,” I answer, “so I guess not.”

“Kids suck, huh?” She lies straight as a board, never turning her head or lifting an arm. But I can hear her fingers whistling in the grass, making swishing noises as they pass over every blade before colliding with mine. She finds me with her pinky first and it shouldn’t take my breath away, but my life is made up of a lot of unexpected moments, so.

“Yeah. Kids suck,” I say. “What about you?”

The grass rustles as she turns onto her side. She is looking at me and her hands are probably tucked under her cheek, but I stay looking up at the sky. I don’t look at it enough.

“It was a pretty shitty day, too,” she murmurs. I wonder if the dirt and rocks beneath us can feel how sad she is, or if it’s just me. “I went to see my dad. He’s, um, he’s—well, I hope I can keep staying with you, I guess,” she stammers.

It isn’t the sadness in her voice that makes me turn my head. I’m used to a sad Santana. No, it’s something else entirely, the way she sounds like a little kid confessing to hiding her dad’s keys and then forgetting about where she put them. It isn’t something you usually hear, embarrassment. Embarrassment is something you feel in flushed cheeks and red ears, in fists that keep unclenching and eyes that will never look at you. But Santana’s gaze is directed right at me. Her face is tired and beautiful; her ears are small and beautiful; her hands find mine again, and they feel beautiful. Her hair fans out like Pocahontas when she flings herself across John Smith, or maybe I’ve just caught her mid-sprint.

(She stopped because Santana thinks she’s just one color of the wind. I want to grab her hand, start running again and explain that I know just how deep inside of her the rest of them are waiting.)

“Of course you can,” I say. “There isn’t a time limit on this, Santana. You can stay as long as you need to.”

“Thanks,” she whispers.

“Is he okay?” I ask. “I mean, I don’t know, do you need to check him in somewhere or something?”

Santana laughs sadly. “If he’d let me, I would. But I’ve tried that before. It doesn’t work.”

“Oh,” I nod. I guess a nod means you agree with something, but I don’t know what I’m agreeing with. Sometimes I just need something to do. “My uncle’s an alcoholic,” I offer. “We had a pretty tough time with him before he got help.”

This time Santana does look away, shame having gotten the better of her. “If it was—um, if it was just alcohol, I could totally handle that. I did, for a couple of years anyway. But, well, I don’t know what kind of shit he takes now. It just got to be too much.”

“Is that why you left?” I ask.

Her cheeks flush and she shakes her head again, with a little more vigor this time. “I can’t talk about that now, Britt. I don’t even want to talk about my dad at all, really.”

“Okay.”

Santana shifts closer to me, wrapping her arms around my torso and resting her head near my neck. “This was my mom’s favorite place in the whole damn city,” she says into my skin. Her breath is warm and her words buzz like bees and I think is what summer means. “I wanted to come here, but I didn’t…I didn’t want to be alone.”

“Well.” I kiss the top of her head; she smells like vanilla and the sun. “You certainly picked the right person then.” She smiles and moves her arm across my stomach; it makes my shirt ride up and a moment later, Santana rests her hand underneath. She splays her palm against my skin. I’m not sure what the reasons are for why people were made to touch, but this has to make the top five at least.

“I have a blanket in my trunk,” I offer.

“Sure,” she whispers.

She greets me with a kiss when I come back. The blanket is squished between us and it’s trapped my arms, but Santana’s hands are more than enough to keep us together. I can feel her fingers pulsing on either side of my face, letting me know that we are connected by an erratic rhythm, lips and fingers that are experts in modern dance because no one has invented the steps yet.

When the stars finally come out, Santana cries. I reach my hands under the blanket, searching for a place to touch that will ebb the flow of tears, but it seems there isn’t one tonight. So I mirror her hand, spread my palm over stomach, and hope that she’ll trust me enough to let all the bad things flow right out of her and into me.

We fall asleep to a quiet night and a hopeful sky.


	6. Clown

**6\. Clown**

_i guess it's funnier from where you're standing,_   
_'cause from over here i missed the joke._   
_clear the way for my crash landing._   
_i've done it again, another number for your notes._

Once when I was seven my mom asked my dad what he thought of her new haircut. It was a terrible haircut, the kind that adults get when they’re nervous about getting old. I hated it, my sister hated it, and I could totally tell my dad hated it. But when my mom asked him, he said it looked great (honey), and he smiled. I asked him later why he lied, and he said that sometimes happiness comes before truth. He could have been honest and said it was a terrible haircut, but that would have made my mom sad, so instead he said what she wanted to hear. _Truth is tough, kiddo,_ he’d said. _Sometimes you have to tell different truths to different people._

It took me a couple of years to realize he was wrong.

I think truth is kind of like gravity. It doesn’t depend on people. It exists whether we want it to or not. The problem is that people don’t always believe in it. We tell ourselves that truth is fluid, that one word might mean two different truths to two different people, but we’re wrong. People don’t create truth. People create lies. Because lies are easier to believe, right? Lies make you happy. They make you feel safe and reassured. It’s truth that’s the scary part, because you might have to accept something you’ve been afraid of for a long time.

There is truth all over Santana. She just doesn’t see it yet.

/

Most of the time I’m totally cool connecting truth and happiness. It’s a pretty simple and honest way to live. I can’t be anything but me, so if someone doesn’t like that, the problem is on their end. But living with Santana, I get my truth in tiny batches. My days are full of dancing and putting on a show. They’re full of Mike and Quinn and smiling kids with parents that look at me with suspicious eyes. My days are full of performances and lies, basically. But my nights, they are quietly Santana. They smell like campfires and rum, marshmallows and chicken (because that’s still all she can cook). They taste like laughter and sweat and Santana and sometimes cigarettes even though I don’t like it when she smokes.

My days are lies, and my nights are truth. Most people would appreciate the balance, but I don’t want to be balanced. I want to be whole.

Weeks pass like this, right on into July. It’s like walking on the edge of the curb, or sitting on one end of a seesaw. Sometimes I fall and sometimes it’s dark before anyone shows up to sit with me.

(But when she does, boy are those my favorite nights.)

Santana is a person made for twilight, I think. Quinn is dark and I like sunrises, but Santana lives in purple skies and oranges so bright they make you squint. Santana is seven o’clock-sun, the chill that runs down your shoulders if you move too far into the shade. She can be day if she wants to be (and I think she really, really wants to be), but mostly she hovers in those minutes right before the sky goes dark. That’s the time you get sad because you can’t see enough to throw your Frisbee, but you’re excited for the bonfires to start. It’s when you swat the most bugs, when you get the most bites, when the s’mores taste the best and the laughs are loudest. It’s the best time to see the fireworks (and you can pretend not to notice the smoke they leave behind). Twilight is when you start to get sleepy but you fight the hardest to stay awake.

Over the next couple of weeks, I learn that nobody fights harder to stay awake than Santana. We spend a lot of time by my fire pit, the one my dad had built when all of the Pierce children could be trusted to make grilled cheese by themselves. I was fourteen and my little brother Alex was ten, and he was sporting a half-healed blister from his latest cooking attempt. My mom complained the whole time, but my dad just said that was the best way to ensure he’d stay away from the fire. He was right.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Santana is good at making fires. She does it so much with her words, so why wouldn’t I expect that she could do it with real flames, too? Except I didn’t. I didn’t expect it at all—this fragile, feathery, quiet girl looking so at home with a lot of logs and lighter fluid.

I ask her about it toward the end of June while I rock in my hammock and watch her stoke the flames with a gnarly stick.

“You have a lot of secrets, Santana Lopez,” I tell her as I take a sip of beer that is getting warmer quicker than I can drink it.

“You’re only just now figuring this out?” she smirks back. The fire pops and she doesn’t even flinch.

“Were you a Brownie? Did you wear adorable brown uniforms with green sashes and merit badges?”

“What?” Santana turns to look at me, her face scrunched and amused and bewildered all at once. It’s funny how she hates emotions because her face is really good at expressing them.

“You’re really good at making fires,” I point out. “You must have learned it from somewhere.”

Santana smiles and turns back to the flames. She pokes at the charred remains at the bottom of the pit. I think she’s stalling, but she looks so pretty doing it that I can’t be annoyed.

“Maybe I’m just a child prodigy with fire,” she jokes.

“You’re not a child anymore. So that just makes you an arsonist.”

“Well, I am pretty good at starting fires.”

“…In my pants,” I snort.

Santana hangs her head, laughing, and drops her stick into the pit. It’s either her knees or the fire, but something cracks as she stands up. I don’t think about it too much; how could I with the way she’s smiling at me?

“You need another beer?” she teases as she stands over me.

“Shut up; you’re not so sober yourself.”

She just chuckles and gestures for me to scooch over. She isn’t graceful when she slides in next to me, but she smells like smoke and warmth.

“You smell like summer,” I mumble into her neck.

“Well, that’s good. I’d hate to smell like winter. That’d be such a buzzkill.”

“I like winter. Winter smells like family and trees.”

“Winter smells like cold.”

“No way; winter smells like fire, too. Winter fires warm you the best.”

Santana shifts in the hammock, swaying us in disjointed jumps. “I wouldn’t know. I haven’t made a winter fire in years.”

“Well, you can make one for me at Christmas.”

“I could just teach you.”

I adjust my head against her shoulder. I let her words dissolve into the air, disappearing like smoke when it gets so high that you can’t see it anymore. Her sweatshirt smells like charcoal and matches and I want my hair to soak it all up. I reach down and lift her hand from her lap; her sleeves drift past her fingers and slouch like day-old socks. I uncover her fingers and play with them, smoothing the skin across her knuckles because it’s summer and because I can. These are the fingers that protect, that love, that build fires. These frail, tired fingers hold the power of a whole person. No, I will not ask Santana to teach me how to build a fire. Fires require a special touch, and these are the fingers of a magician.

But I don’t tell her that. “No,” I just say, “yours would be better anyway.”

“Okay,” she hums. She disentangles her fingers from mine, leaving nothing but our pinkies linked. I think I can feel her heart pulsing insistently under her skin, or maybe that’s mine. I can’t tell anymore.

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“Which one?”

“ _Were_ you a Brownie?” I poke her side. “Because I bet you’d make a cute one.”

“No,” Santana laughs. “My dad taught me how to build a fire. He took me camping once.”

“Just once?”

“I don’t know,” she answers. “I just remember the one time. I don’t know where we went, but I’d convinced myself we were going to the jungle. And I didn’t need it at all, but I made my dad buy me a camouflage bandana the day before we left. He called me Rambo the whole drive there and I asked him what he meant. He just said that it was my job to scare away anything dangerous when we got there.”

“You’re such a dork,” I tease.

“Yeah,” she agrees, laughing airily. “Anyway, we spent two days swimming and building sandcastles and playing catch, and at night he told me the secret to making the perfect fire.”

“Ooh, what is it?”

“I can’t tell you that,” she smiles. “But it’s happening right now and it has nothing to do with flames.”

Santana gets quiet after that and when she crawls into bed with me that night, she presses herself against me but she won’t say anything.

We spend every night after that out on the hammock and we talk about our days and the sky and sometimes we don’t say anything at all.

But I don’t ask about the fires again.

/

The second Monday of July, Santana is gone when I wake up. Instead of her hair, I find a note on her pillow; it crinkles under my fumbling hand when I accidentally squash it.

_Britt—_

_Gonna be a long day. I’ll be home late, but save me some chocolate, you Hershey’s hogger._

She signs the note with “Santana xx” and I spend my entire shower trying to decide how many extra meanings are in those two letters.

I’ve never been a very decisive person. It’s an annoying shower.

/

I’ve taken to driving to work even though the park we meet at is less than ten minutes from my house because I get strange looks when I walk. There are only a few kinds of people walking around at seven o’clock on a summer morning, and none of them are younger than forty. There are the old lady speed-walkers, the ones who think I can’t see the nasty looks they shoot me because their sunglasses are so big. They think they whisper as they walk away, but they’re old. A whisper to them is a shout to me, and I’m not deaf.

Then there are the dog-walkers. They’re fat old men who get bullied by their wives, or they’re the fat wives in workout gear who think they’re going to be thin someday. They both sneer at me, and half of it is just because I’m young and pretty.

The other half is the same reason everyone else stares, and I don’t really feel like explaining myself, so I drive.

I guess I sort of understand why they all stare. Nothing really brings people together like hating the same thing. And maybe I am a little used to it, the looks and the whispers and the eyebrows that scrunch somewhere between confusion and disdain. But this time, it feels a little more vicious. In high school, at least I could pretend that people just thought I was funny. (Because they did. But it wasn’t always a good funny. Sometimes it was the bad kind, the kind that follows you around everywhere even if it isn’t true.) In high school, I got laughs, and I could pretend they were genuine. That people just appreciated my sense of humor and understood when I wasn’t actually joking. But as I got older, they started laughing at things I was the most serious about, and it got harder to lie about what they thought of me. That was pretty much when I decided my dad was wrong.

It was also when I wished that he weren’t. People call me simple all the time, but my life has never been easy.

So the looks this time, they say a lot of things. Some of them I’m used to and some of them are new. When the dog-walker in the morning looks at me as we cross paths and rolls his eyes, his eyes say, “There you go again, doing something stupid.” When the cashier at the grocery store looks between Santana and me (because there’s no point in being secretive anymore) and her eyes are wide and sad, they tell me that they can save me from making any more mistakes, and I get a little taste of what Santana must see all the time. I don’t like it.

“Why?” the waitress’s chin asks when she takes my order.

“What kind of example are you setting for my child?” the father’s sad head shakes.

And worst of everything, they don’t say anything to me with their words. It never comes up in conversation because after every one of these gestures, they make a decision. “We don’t understand what you’re doing,” they think as the light behind their eyes dims, “but you’re Brittany Pierce. If anyone was going to make this mistake, we expected it to be you.”

I want to change their minds, but lies are loud and sometimes I only have the energy to tell the truth very quietly.

So I drive to work and I let Mike deal with the parents. I meet Quinn for milkshakes after work when I can.

(Quinn is the only one who gets all of my truth. She knows the college-me and the summer-me, the one that doesn’t pity Santana or want to change her. Quinn knows the Brittany who loves Santana. And if there is a Santana who loves Brittany back—and I hope there is—Quinn is working on getting to know her, too. It’s slow and they’re both resisting, but they’re trying, too.

It’s nice. But it’s far less truth than I’m used to, and sometimes it makes me sad.)

Today the parents are colder than normal and I’m snapping at the kids and Mike. He even looks like he’s about to yell at me once, so it’s a welcome relief when the last of our campers gets picked up. I want so badly to leave, but Mike is shooting me some serious puppy dog eyes.

“Kind of a day, huh?” he comments as I zip up my duffel bag.

“Yeah,” I blush. “Listen, I’m sorry I was kind of mean all day.”

Mike smiles, and I instantly stop feeling so guilty. His smiles are always so sincere.

“It’s okay, Britt. Just tell me if you need a break next time. Sometimes I think you think this gig is a serious job,” he jokes.

“Dancing is always serious,” I deadpan. Mike cracks first, but I’m right there laughing with him a moment later.

I shift my bag on my shoulder and walk with him out to the parking lot. “Why do you think it’s so hard for people to give second chances?”

Mike cocks his head. “People don’t like admitting that they’re wrong, I guess.”

“Mrs. Adams would say she was wrong before she’d even smile at Santana,” I grumble.

“It’s a different kind of wrong,” Mike says as I unlock my car. He shrugs and opens my door for me, just like he does every day even though he doesn’t need to. “I guess it’s the difference between being wrong and being the wrong kind of person.”

“This town is full of the wrong kind of people, then.”

Mike laughs and bends down to lean his head in my window. “Maybe. But for the record, Santana can tell me just how wrong I am, if you guys ever want to hang out. I’m cool with all my faults.”

I laugh as I drive away. Mike is cool because he doesn’t have many faults. I mean, sometimes he gets the kids to pull pranks on me and he definitely used to jump out from behind corners and scare me in high school, and he’ll keep telling the same story even when it’s not funny anymore.

But still.

/

I watch a couple episodes of _Grey’s Anatomy_ and chow down on some leftover pizza while I wait for Santana to get home. It’s the season where Meredith is really dark and drowny, and before I know it, I’m getting teary-eyed all over my pepperoni and mushroom.

It’s how Santana finds me when she walks in.

“Hey,” she murmurs. Then she notices me. “Oh, jeez. _Buffy_ reruns?”

I laugh and shake my head, sniffling. “No, _Grey’s_.”

She just sets her bag down by the door and joins me on the couch. “I don’t know how you still watch that show. It’s gotten so soapy.”

“Yeah, but it used to be so good.”

“Since when is sad good?”

“Fine, real then,” I amend.

Santana smiles and wipes the tears from my cheeks. “TV shouldn’t be this real,” she says. “I’m gonna go set up the fire. Meet me in five with s’mores fixins and a little Captain?”

I smile and turn off the television. “You got it,” I say. Then I pull her down and kiss her until I feel her soften.

She just smiles and kisses my forehead. “Maybe a blanket instead of the chocolate. I think we both need some cuddles tonight.”

See, that’s the thing about Santana. She might not see it for herself, but she has a way of finding my truth and appreciating it.

The fire is well underway by the time I step outside, blanket in hand. The sun is falling and there are stars peeking out from behind the giant oak tree in my backyard. If I’d had a perfect day, this would be a perfect night.

“Couldn’t find the rum,” I call as I walk up behind her.

“Oh, I forgot to tell you that I picked some up on the way home. It’s in my bag. I can grab it really quickly.”

I shake my head and motion toward the hammock. “Later. Come relax with me.”

“Okay.” She claps dirt and the remnants of bark off her hands, wipes them on the grass, and follows me. It’s too hot still for the blanket, but Santana’s toes are always really cold, so I spread it over our feet.

She plays with my hair as we get settled. “Can I tell you something?” she asks, her voice soft and full of secrets.

“Of course.”

Santana smiles until I’m sure her mouth can’t stretch any wider. “I really want to make out with you right now.”

I laugh and shove her shoulder, rocking us in a swooping arc that stops just before we tip over. “You know what happened the last time we did that. I almost couldn’t untangle the knots and my shirt was totally ruined.”

“Grass is soft,” Santana says, coy and light. “And I’ll _totally_ make it up to you if we fall.”

I smile and kiss her cheek, just because. “Let’s just lie here for now,” I say.

“Okay.” She wraps her arms around my stomach. “Bad day?”

I sigh into her hair. It doesn’t smell like campfire yet, but there are pleasing remnants of strawberries and vanilla. “Sometimes I just want to not be in Lima.” I stroke her hair as she listens. “I think it would be really cool to go somewhere nobody knows me, completely reinvent myself. People here are too defensive.”

“I know what you mean,” she murmurs.

“Would you come with me?” I ask quietly.

She breathes in, big and unsure as she hesitates. “I’d love to get out of Lima, too,” she says instead of answering. It’s enough, for now.

“Where would you go?”

Santana sighs. I can feel her stomach move against my side. “Anywhere,” she breathes. “Chicago. New York. A tiny town in France.”

“Do you speak French?”

“No,” she laughs, “but I’d pick it up eventually, right?”

“Probably. I mean, you speak Spanish, right? I think they’re pretty similar.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Her words are full of thin lips that have forgotten how to smile.

“How was your day?” I ask, changing the subject.

"About the same as yours,” she answers. “I don’t like Mondays very much.”

I know why. Mondays are when she checks on her dad. Every Sunday, before she falls asleep, I ask her if she needs any help. I’ve offered everything I can think of—if she’s got stuff to carry; if she’s _going_ to have stuff to carry; if she just wants someone to laugh with on the walk over—because I’m really curious about everything. The Mr. Lopez I know is a respected doctor at Lima General who performed heart surgery on Ms. Hagberg when the strain of teaching knocked her out. It sounds morbid, but I want to know what it looks like when someone so stable completely breaks. That way, if it happens to Santana, I might know how to put her back together again.

But she never lets me go with and I’ve been too afraid to follow her.

“How’s he doing?” I ask cautiously.

“Better,” she answers. “I was thinking of staying over the weekend to see what it’s like.”

“Oh. You want to go back home?”

“No,” she says quietly. “But I miss my brother and sister. I miss being some kind of family, even if it was the messed up kind.”

“Maybe they could come stay here,” I suggest. “I mean, we have my brother’s and sister’s rooms, and if they think that’s weird, they can take the guest room. I mean, you never sleep in it anymore.” I laugh and tickle her neck, expecting her to laugh with me.

But her response, when it comes, is firm and serious. “No,” she states quietly.

I breathe out more calmly than I feel. Sometimes I think she’s being frustrating on purpose. “I just don’t like seeing you so unhappy, Santana. Especially when you don’t have to be.”

“This is still my life, Brittany. You don’t know enough to try and fix it.”

“I would if you’d tell me. I just want to help, San.”

“I appreciate everything you’ve done, Brittany. But you don’t need to do anything else. You don’t need to _know_ anything else, and I definitely don’t need to tell you.”

“I think you do,” I protest quietly.

“What, because this is some kind of feelings exchange?  I come home and find you crying on the couch, I comfort you, and now you get to do the same? I’m not obligated to give you anything.”

“You don’t need to tell me for my sake, Santana. You need to tell me for yours.”

“Brittany—”

“It will help, San. I promise you, it will help.”

“You don’t know that!” she yells. Santana rolls away from me, tumbling to the ground and knocking the hammock out of balance. She stands up quickly, swatting tears away from her eyes. “There’s no way you could ever know what will help me,” she rasps. “And I’m in no rush to find out. I’ve survived up until now just fine, Brittany. I don’t need—I don’t need someone else judging me for managing my life the wrong way.”

I cross over to her side of the hammock, walking slowly in case she bolts. But she doesn’t notice. She just keeps her eyes focused on the ground, wiping at her cheeks and sniffling intermittently.

“Santana, you’re shaking. What happened today?” I press softly. “Please, please tell me.”

She looks up at me and her eyes are wrecked—angry, sad, resigned, desperate. She looks at once like a hurting seven-year-old, with the eyes of someone who has weathered too many storms.

“I need rum,” she snaps, flying across the backyard with the kind of speed only anger generates.

I watch the door as she slips inside, just to make sure I’ll see her when she comes back.

Sometimes when she walks away angry, I feel like she was never there at all.


	7. Daddy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know, I know; I'm terribly late. But I'm such a Brittany when it comes to confrontation that I have a hard time writing it, and man was this chapter a bitch. But here it is for you to read, and I hope you enjoy despite its extreme tardiness!

**7\. Daddy**

_he pulled you closer said he'll never let go._   
_you couldn't trust him but you never said no._   
_in that moment, he made you forget how it feels when he's gone._

Santana takes a long time coming back outside. She walks around the house—I can see her pacing in the living room, disappearing out of view every time she goes into the kitchen. I think she’s just walking around in circles. Sometimes I see her mouth move. But she’s got the rum in her hand, so I know she’s coming back to me.

(And even if she doesn’t, I’ll go inside and find her. I’m not afraid of that.)

The back door closes with a quiet click fifteen minutes later. Santana walks toward me, her head pointed resolutely toward the ground. She won’t look at me, but she’s got a death grip on the Captain Morgan.

I let her stall for a little while longer—poke around the fire, drag a lawn chair over to the other side. (I try not to be hurt by that. Maybe she’s just tired of lying down. The hammock kind of hurts your back after a while.) The chair creaks as Santana sits down. We haven’t used those things since our last family vacation three years ago.

It’s minutes before Santana speaks. She drinks from the bottle and rolls her head around a bit, trying to get comfortable. Once again, her idea of comfortable is away from me.

“Have you ever seen a hyena, Britt?” Santana asks. She says this mostly into her bottle of rum, so I’m pretty impressed with myself that I can actually understand her.

“Sure,” I nod. “I used to watch _The Lion King_ all the time. They’re sassy.”

Santana laughs and takes another drink. “I mean for real.”

“I know,” I smile. “I just wanted to make you laugh. But for real, no, I haven’t.”

Santana bobs her head absently. “I have. We went to St. Louis when I was nine to visit my dad’s side of the family. My uncle’s big on family outings, so he took us to the zoo. It’s the only time I’ve been to one.” She sips her drink and clears her throat. “Anyway, we split into two groups after lunch—my aunt and uncle took all the little kids, and the rest of us went with my dad and his girlfriend. I think he just wanted to take me so I could bond with _Leslie._ ” Santana spits out her name like it tastes bad, like that burns instead of the rum, and I wonder if that’s why she can drink alcohol so easily—because her throat’s been on fire for so long that she’s used to it.

“But that’s exactly why I dragged my cousins along,” she continues. “So, we went walking by some of the cooler animals and ended up by the Africa section. My cousins all flocked around the lions and cheetahs, but I wandered off and looked at this hyena for a while. He was kind of just sitting around until he noticed me, and then he started pacing his cage and laughing. I thought it was funny at first, you know? Laughing animals are funny. But he wouldn’t stop looking at me and he never shut up. He kept his eyes on me and paced his cage and laughed. Hyenas laugh kind of like they have evil secrets. Like, maybe they won’t run at you and attack you, but they know who will, and they’ll be there afterwards to eat what’s left. That’s how the hyena laughed at me until I got scared and ran back to my dad.”

She takes a big breath before continuing. “I didn’t really remember that day until the first time I saw my dad get really messed up. Because that’s how he looks at me. When I stay up and take care of him—after I’ve told Izzy and Turo to go to bed—he just sits there and looks at me like he knows all my secrets, and he knows exactly how they’re going to break me. I can tell myself that he’s so doped up he’s not doing it on purpose; that he won’t remember anything in the morning; that it’s just the drugs making him weird. But his eyes never change. He laughs and jokes and says stupid shit, but his eyes are always scary.”

“I don’t—”

“You don’t need to say anything, Britt,” Santana interrupts. “I don’t expect you to know what to say.”

“No, I wasn’t—” I take a breath and change direction. “I just wanted to say that you’re hogging all the liquor.”

Santana finally looks at me. “This isn’t funny, Britt,” she says.

“I know,” I reply. “I’m not trying to be funny. I’m just trying to make you feel better. More comfortable.”

“Nothing about this is comfortable.”

“Well, fine!” I sit up in the hammock, setting in into a wobbly spin. “Actually, no,” I reconsider. “Not fine. Why do you get to deflect when I’m opening up but I can’t do the same?”

“Because it isn’t opening up for you,” Santana scoffs. “It’s just talking. I don’t mean it like that,” she clarifies when I frown. “I listen to you, Britt; I do. But you’d be this open with anyone, right?”

“Well, yeah, but—”

“I can’t do that. Maybe someday, I don’t know. But it isn’t fair if we keep having these conversations and you expect me to give you something that I just…can’t.”

“Okay.” I get off of the hammock and pull another lawn chair from the shed. I sit across the fire from Santana. I look at her through the flames and it’s like I’m seeing a mirage, a suggestion of who Santana could be. The problem is that she’d look like that even if the fire weren’t there.

“Can I tell you something, Santana?” I ask.

“Of course,” she whispers.

“It’s not as good as your hyena story.”

“That’s okay.” She almost gets away with hiding her smile. I almost let her.

“My mom used to not really understand me,” I start. “My little sister’s always been her favorite and my brother got in trouble a lot, and I could have the best time playing by myself. So she kind of just let me do whatever I wanted. We didn’t really start to get close until all that stuff started happening with my uncle, you know, ‘cause he’s her brother. Anyway, she told me about this time she accidentally left me in a mall in Columbus. I think I was six or something and she dropped me in the play area and went to go do some shopping, and when she was done she just left. She said later that she didn’t realize I wasn’t there until she was halfway home because she liked the quiet. She said it was nice not to have to answer questions about who invented words or how come we can’t change the color of our eyes.”

“What about you?” Santana smiles.

“Me? I think people invented words when screaming stopped being enough.”

“No,” Santana laughs. “I mean, did you miss your mom? Like, did you ever not think she was coming back?”

“I don’t know,” I shrug. “I was six; I barely remember. I think I kind of miss everyone all the time anyway.”

“Why?”

I flop my shoulders again. Maybe we’re talking about words, but even they can’t explain everything. There’s a whole lot of meaning in how long you hang a shrug, how quickly you break eye contact. I don’t know if I’m a dancer because I speak with my body, or if I speak with my body because I’m a dancer. I don’t really need to know. I just need to speak.

“I guess,” I answer, “I guess sometimes you just love people so much that you miss them, you know? Missing people, it isn’t about being apart from them. It’s the feeling that even when they’re right in front of you, you still want more because they’re just that good. Sometimes when we have Christmas dinner I’ll be talking to my aunt and miss my brother, even though he’s two feet away.”

Santana won’t look at me again, but she can’t hide anymore either. Fire dances across her face, creating shadows that tell me just how much she misses me.

She looks completely terrified.

“Can I come sit next to you?” I murmur.

The fire pops and crackles, chiming in with spits of Morse code that I wish I could translate, before Santana nods.

I scoot my chair over, parking myself on her right side. I reach across her and steal the rum—she grunts in protest, but she also doesn’t notice that I’ve sneaked my left hand into her right. That’s what Santana still has to learn about me: if you’ve successfully thwarted one of my surprises, that wasn’t the surprise I was going for.

“You seem pretty close with your mom now,” Santana comments.

“Yeah, I am. We kind of learned how to listen to each other when I got to high school. No one else really thought I had anything important to say, but I did. I do.”

“I’m sorry.”

I wave my hand. “Don’t be. I didn’t say all that so you’d feel sorry for me.” I squeeze Santana’s hand and give her a small smile. Small smiles say more than big ones, I think. Small smiles can be sad. “People can change, Santana, if they just listen to each other. You have trouble saying stuff, and sometimes I have trouble _not_ saying stuff.” Santana chuckles. “And yeah, I’m a really open person with just about everyone. But you’re the only person I want to be open with. Everyone else kind of just…happens.”

“Really?” Santana whispers.

“Really,” I nod. “Talking about how I am with my mom, it’s like talking about high school. I can laugh about the fun parts but mostly what I remember is how alone I used to feel. And I’m better now, but for a long time I felt really—really stupid. So I try not to talk about it ever. Actually,” I consider, “I don’t think I ever have, not even with Quinn. But I want to talk about it with you, even though I don’t like to, because I want you to know me. That’s what I’ve been trying to say, Santana. I don’t expect you to tell me things just because I can’t shut up about _my_ feelings. I don’t expect you to do anything. But sometimes when I share stuff, it just feels so good. Like, you know how when you’re at the pool and you start to get out, you go underwater before you vault yourself up and then it feels like there’s twenty pounds of water coming off your shoulders? That’s what it feels like and it’s super awesome, and I just want you to feel it, too. Because sometimes I think you have the whole ocean on your back, San.”

Santana twists her head so I can’t see her eyes. She takes a shaky breath before she speaks. When she does, her voice sounds like she fell asleep with her mouth open and half-full of sandpaper.

“Is this the part where I confess all of my secrets to you?” she asks, hiccupping and sniffling and I think she tries to laugh but it gets stuck on the way out. I wonder if Santana has all these hidden places inside of her—the back of her throat, the bottom of her spinal cord, the small of her back—and maybe that’s where all the vulnerable and free parts of her live. Maybe it isn’t that she’s scared. Maybe she’s just gotten so cozy in her hiding places that she doesn’t want to leave them, like when you wake up early in the morning in winter and you’re aware of just how warm your bed is.

“Depends,” I answer. “Do you want it to be?”

This time, Santana’s laugh is a lot more recognizable. “I don’t know.”

“That’s okay, too.”

Santana steals the rum back and takes a big swig. “Why did you start talking to me at the diner, Britt? I mean, the real reason, not just because you’re the nicest person in this whole town.”

“That is the real reason,” I grin.

“Britt,” Santana chides.

“I know,” I chuckle. “You just…you looked like you needed someone to talk to, and then, well, everything else sort of spiraled after.”

“Like a terrible, destructive tornado?” Santana jokes.

“Like a really cool pattern of dominoes,” I answer. “You know, the kind where you spend hours setting it up and you have to tip the first one in just the right way or else everything crumbles.”

“Does that mean I’m going to crumble one of these days?”

“I don’t know,” I smirk. “How well have I tipped you?”

“Oh, you’ve done _something_ right,” Santana winks.

I laugh and squeeze her hand. We pass the rum back and forth between us, trading sips. Sometimes Santana plays with the fire, keeps it going, but mostly she just sits with me. She sits and drinks and swipes her thumb across the back of my hand, and I don’t know if it’s the fire or the alcohol or just Santana, but this is the warmest I’ve ever been. Maybe I’ve found my cozy spot. Hiding places aren’t so bad when you’ve got company. It certainly feels like the best place ever—eyes closed, face flushed, sitting next to a girl that only I get to know.

Santana _is_ my hiding place, if I really think about it (and it’s pretty awesome to think about, so I really do.)

“Are your eyes closed, Britt?” Santana’s voice is soft and raspy, but it sounds surer than it usually does when we have late-night chats.

“Why don’t you just check?”

“Because my eyes are closed and that would ruin it.”

I laugh. “Okay. Then yes, my eyes are closed.”

“Okay.” Santana clears her throats and fidgets, rustling around in her chair, her shoes sliding against the cool grass.

I just wait.

“That night at the diner,” she starts, “I’d been sitting for about half an hour before you came in, just thinking about my family. My dad had left work early to pick Izzy up from her friend’s house—something I usually do—only he didn’t tell me about it. I mean, I got to Jessica’s house and her mom told me that Izzy wasn’t there anymore, that my dad had gotten her, and I swear my heart stopped. She just looked at me like I was crazy, but I was so worried about her. He’d been relatively good for a while but I still didn’t know what he was gonna do. Turo, he can take care of himself, you know? He knows what it looks like when my dad’s about to get really fucked. He doesn’t—I can see in his eyes that he doesn’t think he has a father anymore. But Izzy does. I don’t let her see the worst of it, and maybe I should because she still thinks her dad is working when he misses a soccer game or birthday party. She doesn’t know that he’s face-down in a pile of barf or doing lines at some shady hotel. Izzy still calls him Daddy.”

“So what happened?” I murmur. I don’t need to open my eyes to know that Santana’s crying because I am, too.

(It’s a funny feeling, crying in front of a fire. It’s like, as soon as the tears leave my eyes, the heat dries them out, and I’d never know they were there except I can still feel them under my skin.)

“I got home as fast as I could and I had to take a moment to catch my breath outside. I could see them from the window—Turo was there, too, and they were all playing a game and laughing and they just, they just looked like such a fucking family, you know? I watched them for a few minutes and you know what my first thought was?”

“What?”

“ _Get away from my daughter_.” Santana laughs, quick, with an upward inflection, like her words are just about to jump off the swell of her lips. “I mean, it’s crazy, right? She’s only 11 years younger than me. Izzy’s just my sister. But, _god_ , I’ve been raising that kid since she was born and he’s still allowed to swoop in and grab her just because he’s her dad. Like that means anything anymore. And I just—I saw them all laughing and I saw how much she still believed in him and I just had to get her out of there. I didn’t—I didn’t want him to turn her into me.”

Santana takes a deep, shaky breath, and then she crumbles. The rum thuds quietly against the grass as she drops it, sobbing into her hands, and I’m there a second later, rubbing her arms and kissing her wrists and wishing that fixing Santana would be enough to solve all of her problems.

Her skin is clammy and she won’t stop shaking and for the first time, out of all the times I’ve taken care of crying people, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to say, and there isn’t a bowl of ice cream big enough or a toasted marshmallow gooey enough to make this all better. I can’t kiss the hurt away and I’ve never been very good with words. There are two people in front of this fire and both of them are helpless, and I don’t like it.

“He’s getting better though, right?” I ask once Santana calms down. “You said he was getting better.”

Santana just shakes her head. “I lied,” she says from behind her hands. It’s like I’m hearing her through water-damaged speakers. “He’s still just as bad. Maybe he’s worse; I don’t know. I think I’ve stopped noticing, and then—god, today he just…”

“He just what, Santana?” But she doesn’t answer me. I pull her hands gently away from her face. “Look, I don’t like to push, but if he…” I swallow down any catastrophic thoughts. “Did he touch you, did he hit you?”

Santana finally opens her eyes. They’re the eyes you get when you first realize that your parents can’t really give you a good explanation for why people die. It’s that kind of pain that completely demolishes a seven-year-old, the kind that destroys everything you thought you knew (adults are smarter than kids, parents are invincible, Lord Tubbington will be with you forever.)

“No,” she mumbles, swiping her palms across her cheeks. She repeats it one more time, just so I know she’s serious. “He hasn’t ever hit me or Turo or Izzy. The kind of shit he pulls, it isn't physical, you know? Except sometimes I kind of want it to be, just because that's easier to fight. Someone hits me—no matter who it is—I'm gonna hit back. But all this mental crap he pulls...I have it in me to yell back. I did yell back, for a little bit. I could give it just as good as he did. I could bitch and gripe and make him feel worthless. But...”

“But what, San?”

“I don't want to be like him, Britt. I don't want to nag him or take care of him or make sure he hasn't pissed the bed again. He's my dad, okay? I want him to _be_ my dad. I want to be his daughter. I want to think of him like Izzy still does.”

She slips her left hand out of my grasp and rests her head on it, tangling her fingers in her hair.

“I want to come home with Breadstix for Turo and Izzy and eat dinner and wait up for my dad. I want to be the kind of family that can handle a busy doctor's schedule because we spend weekends together and leave each other little notes. I want to be able to go to college instead of working my ass off trying to support two children.”

She sniffs once, twice, doesn’t even bother a third time.

“I walked in to check on him and he was worse than I’ve seen him in a long time. When he’s really messed up, he has this habit of rewriting all of his patient charts from work. Like, wherever he can—notebook, napkins, towels. I found him in his office and his desk was covered in black Sharpie. It’s this really nice desk that he bought back when he got promoted and he used to be so protective of it, wouldn’t let me or Turo anywhere near it. So I kind of snapped and yelled at him and told him how much work it was going to be to fix it and he just…he got scarier than normal.”

Santana drops her hand and rests her elbows on her knees.

“I think he thought I was one of his patients or something, because he kept yelling at me that I’d forgotten to take my medicine and they were going to have to operate. But he kept threatening me, saying how it was my fault that my heart was bad in the first place, how maybe he’d mess up the surgery to teach me a lesson. And he was walking toward me and clenching his fists and suddenly his face is really close to mine and he’s got me backed against the wall.” Santana shrugs her shoulders like she’s done something wrong. “I looked at him and I knew this was it, that we were about to actually fight. I kept my eyes on him because I figured I’d be able to anticipate his moves better that way, but he didn’t do anything. He just kept talking and looking at me and it was really fucking creepy. So when he flinched, I ducked. I mean, full-on, hit the floor kind of ducking.”

Her mouth pulls at the corners, quivering before she has a chance to stop it.

“San, why don’t we go—”

“Today was the closest he's ever come to hitting me,” she interrupts, “and I wasn't ready. It wasn't easier and I wouldn't have hit back. I know that. I was just terrified.” Santana looks up and I just want to suck all the devastation out of her eyes, like some kind of pain vacuum. “I want to know what it's like to not be terrified all the time, Britt,” she cries.

“Oh, Santana,” I coo. “I know. I know, baby.” I kiss her palms, her cheeks, any place of her I can reach. “Let’s just go inside, okay? You’ll feel better after some sleep.”

“Sure.”

She fills a bucket with water from the tap outside and stares at the fire for a while before she puts it out.

Santana goes back inside the way she came out—silently.

/

“Do you wanna take a shower? We both kind of smell smoky.”

Santana shakes her head. “No, thanks. I just want to sleep.”

“Okay.” I rifle through my drawers and throw her an old pair of shorts. I smile when she crinkles her eyebrows. “You need to do some laundry, missy, and no way are you getting in my bed in those stinky clothes.”

Santana laughs and gives me a salute. “Yes, ma’am.”

She climbs into bed a moment later, taking up her favorite spot on the left side of the bed. By the morning, she’ll have migrated to the middle, and I keep telling her that she should just start there. But Santana likes doing things her way, and the grumpy morning face she gets whenever I mention it is always worth it.

“Are you gonna be able to sleep?” I ask softly.

“Yeah,” she nods.

“Good.”

I turn off the lamp on my nightstand.

“Britt?”

“Hm?”

“Do you think—could you sing me something?”

“I’m not much of a singer,” I laugh.

“Well, I’m not much of a dancer, but all you’d have to do is ask.”

“Okay,” I smile. “What should I sing?”

“Anything.”

“Okay.”

“Wait.”

“What?”

“Just…wait.” Santana turns on her side, facing me. Her eyes are just barely distinguishable in the dark, and I spend so much time trying to see if I can make them bleed into the night that I almost miss her kiss. Santana takes me by surprise, softer than I’ve ever felt her, and I can taste every part of her. Everything that she is, it’s in this kiss, all insistent tongue and full lips. They’re full like they always are, big and delicious, but they’re full of other things, too—things like hyenas and punches and rum and a terrible ache that I don’t think will ever go away, but that doesn’t stop me from trying to kiss it from existence. Santana runs her fingers through my hair, bunches them in my shirt, steals my breath and anything I might have been planning on doing with it. She smells like change and tastes like a home I didn’t even know I’d been looking for.

“Britt,” she breathes, “I really—I mean, I think I really—I miss you,” she stutters.

I smile. “I’m right here, silly.”

She matches my grin, only hers is a lot more embarrassed. It’s adorable. “Like I said, I miss you.”

I lean in for another kiss, just because. “I miss you too, Santana.”

She smiles and scoots over, forsaking her side of the bed for mine.

“You can sing now,” she yawns.

“Okay.”


	8. Maybe

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've had this tradition for about three years where I have to upload something on my birthday, and I certainly wasn't about to fail this year. So, with 32 minutes to spare, have a reverse birthday gift, dear readers.

**8\. Maybe**

_maybe you could stay a bit longer,_   
_i could try a bit harder_   
_we could make this work._

She wakes me with a kiss. Santana doesn’t like to talk about all the things she’s good at, but she’s really good at kissing. Maybe to some people it’s a superpower or magic, but I think it’s just Santana. It’s better that way, because anybody can be a superhero. Spiderman was a loser. Batman was a rich jerk. But nobody else can be Santana.

When I was little, I used to be really scared to sleep because I couldn’t remember any of it. I had a hard time figuring out the difference between dead and asleep, especially when my grandpa took a nap and never woke up. It’s fine now, but sometimes, if I’ve watched a scary movie or gotten bad news or Lord Tubbington won’t stop looking at me (he keeps coming back even though he’s really been dead for two years), that's when I turn on a light so that if I wake up in the middle of the night, I’ll be able to tell right away.

With Santana, I don’t need to turn on a light. Other people have kissed me awake. Santana kisses me alive.

Anyway, she’s a really good kisser no matter what time of day it is and I could totally spend all day doing this if I didn’t have to work.

“Why are you awake so early?” I mumble against Santana’s lips.

“Because you’re awake so early,” she answers, smiling.

“Cute. How late are you working tonight?”

“’Til eight, I think.”

“You want me to pick you up? We could go for some dessert.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“Nothing that you’d find on a menu,” I smirk, pulling the covers over us.

I’m probably going to be late for work today.

/

“No Quinn?”

I uncurl the top of my brown lunch bag and dump its contents on the table. “She’ll be here,” I answer. “She better be; she owes me a soda.”

Mike laughs into his lukewarm leftover pasta. “They’ll put a fridge in this building sometime,” he promises. “Or a vending machine that isn’t full of Tab.”

“Yeah, keep dreaming.”

Technically Quinn isn’t supposed to have lunch with us because she doesn’t work at this camp, but Mike and I have basically run it for the last couple of years and we can get away with anything. So we make the rookie counselors watch all the kids at lunch and we take a break in the conference room next door. It’s a nice break from first-graders and it lets us talk about all the things we can’t in front of the kids, like how Quinn can never hold her liquor and Mike can hold more than he probably should.

Quinn announces herself not by walking in the door but by the chorus of “Hi, Miss Fabray” I can hear from all the kids.

(One time, when Mike was bored and none of the kids wanted to dance, he told them all a bunch of stories about how he had this friend who was really serious and sometimes scary but if you were nice to her, then she had the prettiest smile ever and she would be your best friend forever and always.

Little kids will believe anything, but I think Mike was buying it, too.)

Quinn gives a little wave at all of the kids as she closes the door, but she rolls her eyes when she turns around to face us.

“Aw, come on, Quinn,” I laugh. “Those kids love you.”

“Oh, I’m not rolling my eyes at them,” she says as she sits down. “I’m rolling my eyes at your girlfriend.”

“I don’t think she’s really my girlfriend.” I blush anyway.

“Well, she’s bossy and annoying.”

“So are you. Do you have my soda?”

Quinn shakes her head and reaches into her bag, pulling out a wide bottle of my favorite root beer that I don’t see very often because I can’t find it anywhere in this town.

“Is that…?”

“Oh yeah,” Quinn sighs wearily. “Santana made me drive 45 minutes to get it because apparently you left before she could thank you? I didn’t ask and I don’t really want to know.”

“I do,” Mike wheedles.

I blush some more. “It’s not really anything I can share. We just…we had a really good talk.”

“Just a talk?” Mike teases, shoving my shoulder and waggling his eyebrows.

“Yeah, just a talk, you perv,” I laugh. “I wouldn’t tell you if it was more than that, anyway.”

Quinn crunches on a chip. “Why not? You have before.”

“Yeah, you’re always Miss Talkative when it comes to people you’re into,” Mike adds.

“I dunno,” I shrug. “This feels different. Santana’s a quiet person, maybe it’s rubbing off on me.”

“Yeah, I bet that’s not all that’s rubbing—”

I clamp a hand over Mike’s mouth before he can finish. “You want another dance-off? Because I’d be glad to embarrass you in front of the kids again.” I don’t let go until I feel him shake his head.

“Can a third party request a dance-off?” Quinn asks.

I cock my head. “Umm, depends. Normally you have to be competing for something in a dance-off.”

“What if I said I had one more bottle of cold root beer?”

Mike and I turn to look at each other. “That is my most favorite kind of soda, Mike,” I say.

“I hate root beer, but it is hot as balls in this place,” he fires back.

“Dance-off?” Quinn grins.

“Ugh, fine. Dance-off,” I sigh.

The kids all cheer when we tell them about the competition because one dance-off always leads to another and then nothing gets done all day. They still haven’t learned that a free day today means we’ll be working them extra hard tomorrow. (This is a dance camp, not a daycare. If parents don’t have proof by the middle of August that their kids have spent the whole summer actually achieving something, then my house gets a lot of angry calls that I always make my brother answer because he loves messing with people. I mean, I guess it’s a win-win because my brother has fun and those parents get to yell at someone, but yelling is never really that fun, even if it feels good at the time.)

The rules for a dance-off are simple enough: all participants have to dance to the same song, usually some kind of Europop because those always have funky beats. The person who gets the most cheers at the end wins. Mike and I have a running tally that mostly we’ve forgotten but we trust the kids to remind us because they all love rooting for someone. I think I’ve lost once; that time the track was some spastic dubstep and I couldn’t compete with Mike’s crazy robot limbs.

But today it’s Robyn’s “Call Your Girlfriend” and I barely even have to try because Mike isn’t going to beat me this time. He’s all precision and finesse but if you really want to kill this song you have to dance like a chicken clucks. It’s like, you have to find the balance between dancing and being silly. Even when Mike is being silly, he’s still dancing. So he’s going to lose.

I sit with Quinn as Mike goes first. He’s got charm, but I’ve got more.

“Don’t you have an internship to be at or something?” I ask, leaning back on my hands.

Quinn blows some hair out of her face. “A writing workshop, but I’m bailing for the week.”

“Why?”

“I don’t like the assignment we’re doing.”

“What is it?”

“Britt…”

“What?” I shrug. “You’re not doing the assignment. We’re just talking about it.”

Quinn sighs and brushes her ear against her shoulder. It’s a thing she does when she’s nervous. She’ll do it twice more before she finally answers me.

“It’s…we’re supposed to explore how the atmosphere of a place affects our emotions,” she eventually mumbles. “And my professor wants us to go sit somewhere in a hospital for a couple of hours a day.”

“Okay.”

Quinn rolls her head and raises her eyebrows at me. I know what she’s trying to say, but I want to hear her say it. That’s what she gets for being friends with a psychology major.

“I don’t like hospitals, Britt.”

“Because of Beth or because of the crash?”

(Quinn got into a bad car crash our senior year of high school. She’s fine now but she couldn’t walk for a really long time and sometimes she still rubs at her back and her legs in ways that normal people wouldn’t. She’ll scratch really hard, like maybe her bones are itching and she’s just trying to reach under her skin.)

“Does it matter?” she huffs, leaning back and flopping an arm over her eyes.

It does, because even I don’t like to talk about the kind of ache that Quinn associates with Beth and hospitals. That hurts more than if all the trucks in the world ran you over.

“I guess not,” I say instead. “But you don’t have to sit in the nursery or the emergency room, right? You could go by all the heart people.”

“Right,” Quinn scoffs. “Because _that’s_ not depressing.”

“Hospitals don’t have to be. Nurses are nice most of the time.”

“I’m not going, Britt,” Quinn says. She turns her head forward and smiles when Mike finishes dancing.

Well. If she won’t, maybe I will.

/

This is a bad idea. I probably know it’s a really bad idea. Maybe somewhere deep down I even know it’s one of the worst ideas I’ve ever had. But it’s my idea and I’ve never given up on one of those. Other people will do that for me. Like how a lot of my teachers in high school stopped trying to help me a few weeks into all of their classes. They got frustrated when I couldn’t understand things like force and parabolas, but how was I supposed to when they kept explaining them with the same flawed words and equations? I understood stuff, I just couldn’t always do it. Sometimes Quinn says I learn like a cat because cats are usually pretty smart but they can still get distracted by a laser or a piece of string. And like, a cat knows where to look if you point to something off in the distance but they don’t need to know why you’re pointing or how your muscles move to get there. I don’t always need to know the details about why things happen. I just want to know what it means when they do.

I guess that’s what I tell myself most of the time but I don’t always believe it. Sometimes I feel like I should give up (or at least save it for another day, because you can do that forever) and that’s when I end up sitting in a hospital parking lot for half an hour, trying to convince myself that it’s okay to go in.

It isn’t helping either that Santana keeps texting me, and it certainly isn’t helping that she’s adorable at it. She keeps thanking me in different ways for our talk last night and I think that maybe it wasn’t my teachers I should have been asking for help in high school. Maybe chemistry and algebra would have been easier to understand if the girl I want to know more than anyone was explaining them to me.

_Do you have time to talk? I’ve got a whole lunch break and nothing to do._

I bite my lip and hesitate because of course I’ve got time. But I also have something I want to do and if Santana distracts me maybe I won’t do it. Of course, by the time I’ve decided to text back and say that I’m busy, my phone is already buzzing, so.

“Hi,” I answer.

“I was going to wait for you to text back, but I only have twenty minutes of lunch left.”

“It’s five in the afternoon,” I laugh. “That’s almost dinner time.”

“Yeah but my day only started at noon,” Santana counters.

“Fair point.”

“So what were you doing that you couldn’t text back?”

“Thinking,” I say.

“About what?”

“Um, chemistry.”

“Chemistry,” Santana laughs.

“And you,” I add. “And cats.”

“You were thinking about chemistry and me…and cats.”

“Yes.”

She chuckles before speaking. “Britt...”

“What?” Then the ball drops and I blush. “Not like _that_ , Santana. I mean, maybe like that, if you want, but only because you brought it up.”

“Okay.”

“Okay? What—can it be my turn to ask a question now?”

“Sure.”

“Did you really make Quinn go buy me those root beers?”

“What?”

I smile because she sounds like I just caught her eating late-night cookies. “Quinn visited for lunch today like she always does and she said that you made her buy me the root beer as a thank-you.”

“Okay, not cool. If that girl thinks she’s taking credit for my gift, we’re gonna have to have some words.”

I can’t help but giggle at how pouty she sounds. “San…”

“I mean, sure, she gave me a ride, but I bought them.”

“How did you even remember they were my favorites?”

“I dunno,” Santana says. “You mentioned them one time and I forgot what they were called but I remembered which store you said had them. And you left before I could really say the right kind of thank you.”

“You can thank me tonight, when we have more time and I can show you all about chemistry and cats.” I wiggle my eyebrows and by the way Santana laughs, I think maybe she can see.

“Britt, I’m being serious.”

“So am I; I know pretty much everything there is to know about _cats_.”

“Britt…”

“I know,” I say, soft like I think a cloud would feel. Sometimes I think I can feel them in the summer, like when I jump off a diving board or climb a tree. It’s the kind of wind that doesn’t touch any part of you except for your hair and as soon as it kisses you, it disappears. “We’ll talk tonight, okay? Do you still want me to pick you up?”

“Yeah.” Santana clears her throat. “I mean, please. Yes, please.”

“Okay,” I smile. “I lo—I’ll see you later, okay?”

“Okay,” she whispers.

I have to run inside before I chicken out completely.

The cardiology department is on the third floor of the hospital. It’s a lot quieter than the first floor and it’s totally messing with my idea of hospitals. Hospitals are messy, noisy places—until they’re not, and nurses walk slower and patients lay in beds and they might actually laugh with their families. A lot of things are like that, I guess.

The waiting area is kind of pathetic but this isn’t really a huge hospital, so I don’t really know what I was expecting. I park myself in a corner seat so I can see the nurse’s station, the main hallway, and one or two patient doorways. I grab a notebook and open it up because if I’m going to pretend to be Quinn, I guess I’m going to have to pretend to write.

I’ve always had problems writing; I usually get about ten words on paper before my mind starts to really wander. It isn’t that I don’t know what to say, it’s just that I can’t write my ideas as fast as my brain can come up with them, and I’ll write whole paragraphs in my head and then forget what they sounded like when I go to actually write them down. I have problems with attention, but people didn’t really notice until it was too late to try and fix them. If anyone asks why I’m in psychology, that’s it.

“Are you waiting for someone, sweetie?”

One of the nurses has taken the seat next to mine and keeps smiling at me. This is the kind of hospital I wish I could show Quinn.

“Um, no,” I stammer. “I actually—well, this might sound weird, but I’m taking a writing class and my teacher wants us to observe a hospital for a few days. I can go, if you want me to…”

The nurse looks at me like she can’t tell if she wants to laugh or call security. “You serious?”

“Uh huh,” I nod.

“And you picked the cardiology ward? Honey, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I smile. “I just don’t want to be anywhere crazy. Blood makes me faint.”

“Well, no better place to be than a hospital if you think you’re gonna faint.”

“I still try not to do it.”

The nurse smiles and squeezes my shoulder. “That sounds like the right idea.”

“Do you mind if I stay here? I mean, I won’t bother you but if it’s weird, I can leave.”

“Nonsense, honey,” she says as she walks back to the reception desk. “If you want to stay here and write about all the sad things you see, I won’t be the one to kick you out.”

“Okay, thanks,” I laugh. She nods and sits back down.

The funny part about writing is that I’m not very good at telling stories, but I have no problem creating them. I could stay here for another two hours and fabricate an entire fake identity—just get all the nurses involved, maybe some of the doctors and patients, too, and tell them about how my name is Tracy and my father died when I was little of cancer but we don’t like to talk about it because my mom still cries, so I’ve taken to writing all the things she won’t let me say, and also my favorite food is cheese fries because that never changes no matter what my name is.

(We tell kids all the time that pretending is okay. We encourage them to be pilots and astronauts and rock stars. But when they grow up, it isn’t cute anymore and all that pretending turns into lies. I guess maybe I just haven’t grown up yet because I still dream about jumping from star to star.)

I sit in silence for another fifteen minutes, writing absolutely nothing because my head is so full of crazy jumbles that my pen can’t make sense of it. Eventually I just give up and put my notebook back in my bag.

“No luck today?” the nurse asks me as I stand up.

“I guess not,” I shrug. “I thought maybe I’d find something to write about, but I don’t find places very interesting. I like people more.”

“Me, too,” the nurse smiles. “What’s your name, honey?”

“Brittany.”

“Nice to meet you, Brittany. I’m Dawn.”

“Hi, Dawn.”

“Do you have to be somewhere right now?”

I shake my head. “Not for a couple of hours, no.”

Dawn smiles even bigger. “Well, let me tell you about the people-side of this hospital. Maybe then you’ll find something to write about.”

“Cool,” I grin.

I pay attention as Dawn opens file cabinets and explains where all the charts go. Her stubby fingers skim over medical reports without revealing any patient names. She tells me about all of the other nurses, which ones don’t care and which ones care too much. She tells me about her favorite patients, how many of them she still keeps in contact with, how she knows some of their kids and went to their weddings (or funerals, but she doesn’t say too many words about those).

I wonder if Santana knows Dawn, if she used to visit this ward before everything fell apart. Dawn is middle-aged and drooping and looks like she hasn’t moved from her chair in fifteen years, but she also looks warm and cozy, like the kind of aunt or grandmother who would love even the town outcast. I want to ask really badly, but I think that’s not really a story Dawn can tell me.

In the middle of a story about an April Fool’s prank involving two crash carts and a very tricky patient, I catch movement out of the side of my eye. I turn my head just the littlest bit and Dawn follows my gaze. She stiffens almost imperceptibly and drops her voice to a low murmur, absently shuffling through papers.

The doctor approaching the desk is Santana’s father. I can tell because she has his nose and cheeks, but his eyes are tired and old and have none of the warmth that hers do. His hair is combed back neatly and he smells expensive and I might be fooled by his easy smile except when he leans on the counter and rests his chin on his hand, his fingernails are uneven and the tips of his fingers won’t stop twitching.

“Good afternoon, Dawn.”

“Hello, Dr. Lopez.” Dawn’s voice is friendly like a cat. If you pet her, she’ll pet you. But otherwise, she doesn’t even care if you exist.

“Who’s your friend?”

“My niece, Brittany,” Dawn lies smoothly, and I feel my heart speed up when she mentions my name. Santana hasn’t mentioned me to him at all, but I’m still paranoid, I guess. “Visiting for the week.”

“Wonderful. Do you have the chart on 319?”

“Sure.” She ruffles through the cabinet and pulls it out, handing it to him. She does everything without looking up from the papers on her desk.

“Thank you.” He flips it open and checks it. “Good to meet you, Brittany.” He smiles and walks away and I wish I could be fooled by the charm in his lips.

Maybe I’m biased, but he has the smile of a snake.

“Who was that?” I ask just a little too casually.

“Dr. Lopez,” Dawn answers. “One of our senior surgeons.”

“He seemed nice,” I prod.

Dawn checks to see if anyone else is coming and sighs. “He used to be,” she whispers. “But ever since his wife died he’s gotten so cold. He’s made moves on every one of the nurses here. We’ve been trying to get him fired for a long time, but tenure goes a long way in this place.”

“Lopez…why does that sound so familiar?” I muse.

“He has a daughter about your age,” Dawn offers.

“Oh, right. Samantha?”

“Santana,” she corrects. “I hope she’s alright; I haven’t seen her in years.”

“Why not?”

But Dawn shakes her head instead of answering. “You’d have to ask her. But I think that poor girl had to grow up too fast.”

 _You don’t know the half of it_ , I want to say.

 _Santana didn’t just grow up, she aged_ , I want to say.

 _I don’t even know if she likes but I think she misses you_ , I want to say.

Instead I just thank her and leave.

/

I have it all planned out. The story is created and I know what I’m going to say. _Hey, San. Guess what? I went to the hospital today because Quinn needed help with a writing project and I ran into some nurses from your dad’s wing and they really miss you. Maybe you could go say hi again and I’ll go with you because I think you’re afraid of your dad most when he’s not on drugs and I want to help you not be._

Maybe I wouldn’t say that last part, but I’m really, really thinking it.

But it’s all irrelevant anyway because I’m still terrible at telling stories, especially when Santana is standing in front of her restaurant, hair blowing in the wind, hands clasped in front of her, teetering on her heels. She looks so unlike herself that I can’t help but stare.

“Hey, good-lookin’!” I finally call out the window.

Santana finds me with her smile first. “Hi,” she breathes as she slips into the car.

She smells like a kitchen but her dimples are really prominent today and I forget about anything I was going to say or do. Santana knocks every intention out of me that doesn’t have to do with her, I guess.

“Can I kiss you?” I ask, grinning.

“You’d better,” she answers. Her smile is maybe wider than mine.

I don’t remember much of the car ride home except that today she tastes like vanilla lip gloss and spearmint gum and it’s the kind of taste that doesn’t go away.

/

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” Santana murmurs, running a hand through my hair.

“Quinn said something else about you today.”

Her fingers still against my scalp. “Oh, really.”

“Don’t get angry,” I laugh. “It’s not bad, I promise.”

Santana shifts on the couch, readjusting my head closer to her shoulder. “So what did she say?”

“Well, she said that you were bossy and annoying.”

“I’m still waiting for the not-bad part.”

“Yeah,” I continue, “my bossy and annoying girlfriend.”

“Girlfriend, huh?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Is that okay?”

Santana answers me with a kiss and a kiss and a kiss, so I guess that means yes. You don’t kiss someone that many times and then say no.

Santana’s better at telling stories than I am, and she doesn’t even need words.

Maybe she can teach me and we’ll be okay.


	9. Suitcase

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Big thanks to lazarus_girl for helping me break through my writer's block. One of these days I will write emotional chats all by myself. Until then, I'm glad to have such good friends.

**9\. Suitcase**

_my baby's got a suitcase._   
_she's telling me it's too late._   
_but don't nobody, please don't ask me why,_   
_'cause all i did was love her._

“Santana, please—”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“I didn’t, like, go snooping on _purpose_! It just kind of happened.”

“I’m not staying, Brittany.”

“You can’t go anywhere now; it’s 11 at night. And those are my socks.”

“Fine.” She takes the socks out of her duffel bag and tosses them onto my bed.

“So will you listen to me?” I mumble.

She just shakes her head. “Not tonight, Britt.”

I block her from leaving the room. “But tomorrow?” I ask hopefully. “We can talk tomorrow?”

Santana sighs. “I just had to listen to my dad ramble on for forty five minutes about my new friend Brittany that he met at the hospital last week—how pretty she was, how she had the greatest smile, how he had a great conversation with her about what color he should paint the patient rooms because she had the eyes of an interior designer…”

“But that didn’t even _happen_ , San—”

“I know it didn’t,” she interrupts.

“No, but you don’t,” I continue. “I never told him—”

“Britt,” she stops me again, “it doesn’t matter, okay? He shouldn’t know who you are. You shouldn’t have gone to the hospital at all. I know you have this big heart and you want to help everyone, but this isn’t helping. This is meddling and overstepping a really big line.”

“Santana…”

She zips up her bag and drops it on the floor, straightening out the strap when it doesn’t go down all the way. “Look, you want to know something, you ask me. Maybe I won’t tell you right away, but I’m working on it. But you can’t just go sneak around my dad’s work.”

"Santana, _please_. I have...there's a good reason for what I did and it's important. I have things to say."

She frowns, moves my hand from the doorway, and looks at me. "I know you do," she says softly. "I do. I just don't want to hear them."

“So, what do you want?” I ask as she pushes past me.

“I don’t know, Britt,” she shrugs. “To be somewhere else? To be some _one_ else? Right now I just want to go to sleep.” She walks down the hall to the guest room that she doesn’t need to use.

“Can we talk tomorrow, please?”

“I won’t be here when you wake up,” she murmurs, and then she closes the door.

/

(Just this once I wish she’d lied to me.)

/

The funny thing about sadness is I don’t always feel it the same way. Sometimes I feel sad like drowning, like I can’t do anything except for sit in one place and be sad. Sometimes I feel sad like rollercoasters, where it comes and goes in batches that leave my stomach feeling all funny.

Other times, I feel so sad I get through an entire day without realizing I’m doing it. I guess I danced with the kids because they keep smiling at me and they wouldn’t do that if I had spent the day curled on the gymnastics mats like I want to. I hope their recital at the end of the summer is going to go well because I won’t remember a minute of it.

“See you tomorrow, Britt?” Mike asks me as he opens my car door. At least some things don’t change.

“Yeah, see you tomorrow,” I mumble.

I know you’re not supposed to talk on your phone and drive at the same time but I can’t really think of a time when I’ve needed to talk more, so.

“Pick up, pick up, pick up…” I chant as I flip on my turn signal.

“Hello?”

You know how sometimes you’re so nervous for a performance that you’re sure you can’t do it, only then it’s your turn and as soon as you get up there you feel really calm and ready? So it’s like my emotions were just waiting for the right signal, and as soon as I hear her voice they all drip out of me like those sand castles you make at the beach right in front of the water.

“Hi,” I quiver. “Do you feel like a pretzel or fifty?”

“No?”

“Okay, well can you sit with me anyway?”

“Britt, are you okay?” Quinn asks.

“I just need a lot of frozen yogurt right now.”

“Meet you at the mall in ten,” she says, and Quinn Fabray is a really good friend.

I park myself at our usual table and wait for her, watching people make their way in and out of the food court. I wonder if any of them are hiding secrets like me, if they love someone who doesn’t know how to be loved; if they know that days can get ruined in July the same way they can in January. I wonder if they’re watching me at all, wondering about the girl sitting alone in the food court—if she’s waiting for someone or if she’s just lonely. And I guess the answer to that is both, only I don’t really know who I’m waiting for. Maybe it’s Quinn, maybe it’s Santana…maybe it’s me.

“Strawberry-banana, right?” Quinn asks as she sits down.

I take the smoothie she hands me and smile. “You didn’t have to buy me one.”

She shrugs. “You looked like you needed an extra bit of nice.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“What happened?”

I sigh into my smoothie. “I did something really dumb, Quinn.”

“Britt—”

“No, I know I’m not stupid,” I interrupt. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t do stupid things.”

“Okay, well, tell me what happened and I’ll be the judge.”

I think it would be better if Quinn was judging me. The fact that her eyes are concerned and curious only makes me squirm more.

“You know how you said you had that hospital writing thing last week that you didn’t want to do?”

“Yeah…” she drawls suspiciously.

“Well, I kind of did it for you.”

Quinn furrows her brows. “You pretended to be me?”

“No, except I totally should have, now that you mention it. I just…I went there because I wanted to see things for myself.”

“See what, Britt?”

I swirl my straw in the smoothie. “Santana’s dad is a heart doctor,” I admit guiltily.

Quinn cocks her head in disbelief. “Oh, Brittany, you didn’t.”

“Well I just thought, you know, see what he’s like and get out of there. But then a really nice nurse named Dawn started telling me all this stuff, and I couldn’t get away because it was really interesting stuff and I didn’t want to be rude, and then he was there anyway.”

“Britt…” she sighs. She gestures to my drink. “Drink your smoothie and start from the beginning.”

I hesitate. “I don’t know, Quinn. I don’t like telling other people’s stories.”

“Are you sad right now?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sad because of something Santana did?”

“Yes.”

Quinn shrugs. “Then it’s kind of your story, too. So spill.”

“Fine. It starts with her dad, I guess.”

“The junkie,” Quinn clarifies.

I grimace. “He’s not a junkie, Quinn. That’s a terrible word. He’s just…got problems.”

“But with drugs.”

“Yes,” I squirm. Then I narrow my eyes. “How do you know anyway?”

Quinn frowns sympathetically. “Come on, Britt, before he turned into the sleaze of the century, my dad knew the business of everyone who was worth knowing. He had a lot of things to say about Dr. Lopez.”

“They were probably wrong.”

“Maybe,” Quinn shrugs. “Maybe not.”

“I mean, it’s not like he’s really dangerous or anything.”

“You don’t know that,” Quinn protests.

“Yeah, but Santana—”

“Britt,” Quinn interrupts, “you have _got_ to stop romanticizing her.”

“Well, I can’t do that,” I grumble. “She always kisses back.”

Quinn gives me a disbelieving look. “That isn’t what I mean, and you know it.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“I’m just saying, this is some serious shit, okay? This isn’t like her dad isn’t good to her or doesn’t love her enough. This is like her dad has a really severe problem with actual drugs. You’re not going to fix her just by being nice.”

“Doesn’t mean I can’t try.”

Quinn drops her shoulders. “Just tell me what happened, Britt,” she says wearily.

“I went to the hospital last Monday because…I don’t—well, I don’t actually know why I went. But it doesn’t matter. I went there, I talked to Dawn, I saw Santana’s dad for, like, three seconds, and then that was it. I went home and Santana and I had a really nice night. Like, _really nice_ —”

“I got it, Britt.” Quinn clears her throat. “So you didn't really go all Veronica Mars and start snooping. He just happened to be exactly where you were? How did that go down with Santana?”

“Really bad. She just came home so mad last night and I didn’t really get a chance to explain myself.”

It wasn’t like I didn’t try.

 _It isn’t like you think,_ I said.

 _I’m really sorry_ , I said.

 _I’ll tell you everything if you just let me talk_ , I said.

But Santana wanted to talk, too. I guess she wanted to talk more.

/

_The door clicks so quietly I almost think I’ve imagined it. I call out anyway because Santana is good at sneaking up on you and I’m good at being scared._

_“There’s leftover Thai food in the fridge, San.”_

_“I already ate,” she says, and I jump because I definitely didn’t hear her come up behind me. I bet she could have a good career as a mime if she wanted._

_“Okay.” I put down my phone and turn off the TV. “Did you have a good day?”_

_“It was okay,” she shrugs._

_“Did you see your dad?”_

_“Yeah.”_

_“Is he doing okay?”_

_Santana shakes her head, crosses her arms, and looks up at me so harshly I feel myself lean backwards. “I don’t know,” she snaps. “Maybe I should ask you that.”_

_I cock my head like Lord Tubbington used to do when he heard a bird. “What?”_

_“Were you gonna tell me?” she prompts. “The little field trip you took last week?”_

_“Oh.” I think my heart has relocated somewhere inside my feet. “I—I was. I kind of just forgot.”_

_“You just forgot.”_

_“Well, yeah, I left the hospital and then I picked you up from work, and—”_

_“I’m sorry, you got me right after and that wasn’t the first thing you said to me? What the hell, Brittany?”_

_“Well, what was I supposed to say? ‘Hey San, hope your day was good because I just visited your dad at the hospital and he was kind of creepy.’”_

_“Don’t talk shit, Brittany, that is **my** family. You have no right to say that. You had no right to go there at all.”_

_“I just—I don’t understand why you’re so sad, Santana. When I’m with you—”_

_“You can’t talk your way out of this, Britt.”_

_“When I’m with you,” I repeat, “I just…I feel better. You make me smile and laugh and when I’m with you, I’m happy because I can feel how much happiness you have inside you. And it doesn’t make sense to me how one person can take all of that happiness away, and I just wanted to understand.”_

_“If you want to understand me, you come to **me** ,” she says, gesturing to her chest. “You don’t go poking around the hospital and spying on my dad.” Santana clenches her jaw and takes a deep breath. “I think it’s time for me to go,” she murmurs after a long moment._

_Somewhere in my toes, my heart has exploded and it’s sending the shockwaves burning up toward my brain._

/

“What would you have said if she’d given you the chance?” Quinn asks.

“I don’t know,” I groan. “I probably could have thought of something.”

“You can’t just pick and choose the truth, Britt,” Quinn chides gently.

“But that's the problem, Quinn. Santana makes me want to tell the truth even when I know it might be better not to. I could have lied. I could have lied and told her that her dad was crazy because he is—he _is_ a junkie. She’s told me that he kind of imagines stuff sometimes. But I didn’t. I admitted what happened because I want her to understand me and I want to understand her and that's why I went to the hospital. Because understanding her dad is the best way I'm going to get to understand her.”

Quinn covers my hand with hers and my heart sinks because this is what she does when she gives someone bad news. I’ve had enough bad news to last me a long time. “Look, Britt,” she starts, “I know you…you care about her, but there are reasons people keep secrets sometimes. You never understand a person completely; it just doesn't work like that in real life.”

“But I _can_ , Quinn. I know I can,” I insist. “I mean, you understand me and that makes me feel great. And I don't think Santana has anyone who understands her and I want that to be me.”

Quinn exhales heavily, like even the air is frustrating. “What if you don't like what you figure out, Britt? I worry about you. We've all heard what her dad is like. One day Santana might…well, turn out the same. I just want to make sure you know what you're doing. I wouldn't be a very good friend if I just let you carry on like this.”

“Maybe I won't like what I figure out,” I shrug. “But that's part of loving someone, right? I don't like when you're mean sometimes or how you get really closed-off when you're sad, but that doesn't mean I don't love you.” Quinn smiles sadly. “And what if I make the difference, Q? What if _I'm_ the thing that stops Santana from turning into her dad?”

Quinn just sighs. “You might be. If anyone can help her, you can, but please remember you need to look after yourself too. Just make sure that heart of gold doesn't get too tarnished in the process, okay?”

I rest my head in the hand that isn’t underneath Quinn’s. “Did you know that a piece of gold the size of a matchbox can stretch to fit a tennis court?” I mumble. “I think Santana's, like, half a tennis court at most.”

“Oh, Britt…” She gives my hand a confident squeeze. “I'm not gonna change your mind, am I?”

“No. Because it's not my mind you have to change, it's my heart. And I don't think anyone can really do that.”

“Well, whatever happens, I'll support you. Even if I have to pick up that heart piece by piece. It's what friends are for.”

I finish off the last of my smoothie. “You might have to pick up those pieces for a really long time because I don't think she's ever coming back. She was just so sad, Q.”

“She will,” Quinn reassures. “She’ll come back and even if it looks like she won't, you'll know where to find her, Britt.”

“But I _won't_. I don't know anything about her except that I want to know more. I know she has a brother and a sister living somewhere close but I don't know where. I know that she works at that steakhouse but I don't think she'll be there. I know where her dad works but I don't know where he lives and she won't go there anyway because she hates it. And she won't pick up my calls and what if I never see her again?”

“Stop, stop. Don’t drive yourself crazy, Britt. Just…give her a little time. People don't mean half the crap they say when they're angry. The fact she got angry at all means something. Anger doesn't come from someone who doesn't care.”

“I could deal with angry. But she looked at me like I killed her brother or something, and all I wanted to do was help. That's all I always want to do.”

Quinn waits for a long time before answering. She tucks hair behind her ear and gnaws at her lip. She and Santana could be really good friends, I think. Both of them get really embarrassed about feelings, even when they’re good feelings. I guess that’s what I don’t understand most about people. It isn’t fair for me to get mad at someone because of what they feel. People feel weird things. It’s what makes us people and not, like, sloths or something.

“I think,” Quinn begins slowly, “I think Santana has to ask for help first. I know you mean well, but clearly she's not used to sharing her life or people caring about her. That's sad, but it's the truth.”

I roll my eyes. “She's been living with me for over a month, Quinn. Why doesn't she know by now that it's okay to ask for it?”

Quinn just shrugs. “Because that would mean she has to admit there's something wrong first. That also means admitting she's failed. Given what she's dealt with that has to be pretty hard, Britt.”

“But it doesn't matter. I don't care that she's failed because I don't think she's a failure. That's the worst thing you can think of someone, and I would never, _ever_ think that of her.”

Quinn pulls her phone out of her pocket and slides it across the table. “So tell her that, B.”

“I tried. You think I haven't been calling her ever since I saw the guest room empty this morning? She never picks up.”

This time it’s Quinn who rolls her eyes. “That's why you're using mine.”

“Oh. I totally knew that.”

She just smiles at me and waits, watching as I pull out my phone because I haven’t memorized someone’s number since I first got a cell phone. Quinn smiles as I type in Santana’s number and she smiles when I don’t press ‘Call’, and I can’t take it.

“Quinn, could you…?”

“Ah,” she says, because Quinn is good at understanding me even if it did take her a long time. “Smoothie refill, then?”

“Sure,” I smile.

I close my eyes and hit call as soon as I see her walk away because otherwise I’ll chicken out.

It rings three times.

_Hey, it’s Santana. Leave a message…_

I guess maybe I hoped a little too much because I shouldn’t be this upset about not hearing Santana’s real voice when the last time I did, it was sad because of me. But I guess a part of me thought that Quinn’s phone had the answers, that I could trick Santana into talking to me, except the last time I tried to trick her—even if I wasn’t trying to—is the reason I’m desperate at a food court.

I debate not leaving a message because then she’d know whose number to block, but if this is the last chance I’m going to have to set things right, I’m not going to waste it.

“Hi, San,” I whisper, “it’s me. I’m on Quinn’s phone because—well, I thought you might not be answering my calls. But maybe you’re just at work.” I breathe and try to think about what I’m going to say because when I don’t, things come out all weird and wrong. But sometimes they come out like that anyway, so. “I just…I’m sorry about everything, San, and you don’t have to come back because, well, you just don’t, but please let me at least talk to you and explain things. It might not be what you want to hear, but I really, really wasn’t trying to do anything bad. And I—I love you so much, Santana”—and my voice is quivering even though I don’t want it to, like a guitar string plucked in the worst way—“I love you and I worry about you and I just want to make sure you’re okay. So call me or call Quinn’s phone or whatever, but please, _please_ don’t leave like this.”

Quinn doesn’t ask why I’m crying when she comes back. She just gives me my smoothie and some napkins and holds my hand.

I never really thought about how one person can make you feel so lonely. I didn’t even know Santana two months ago. I never thought about her for more than a moment; I never wondered what her life was like or what kind of friends she had or what she liked to do.

I’ve known Quinn practically my whole life. We’ve been friends since kindergarten and we’ve been best friends since Beth. Maybe people have been mean and there were some boyfriends and girlfriends and other people that got in the way sometimes, but I’ve always had Quinn. I know I’ll always have Quinn even if we move to other sides of the world because that’s what it means to be a best friend.

It’s just that now it doesn’t feel like enough.

/

Quinn lets me sleep over. Her house is empty because her sister lives in Seattle and her mom has been sad for the last couple of years. She’s the only person I know who can spend so much time in her bedroom and not take up any space.

We watch a bunch of reality shows and Quinn grabs the toasted almond ice cream bars from the back of her freezer even though I know they’re her favorite things ever and she doesn’t like to share. But this time she splits them with me and we finish off the whole box. And then we eat all the cookie dough ice cream and make our way through mint chocolate chip, and I think that maybe Quinn and I should spend more time together at school because I forgot how huge her sweet tooth is. And this time, when I start crying, it isn’t totally about Santana.

Quinn falls asleep first and normally I’d move her over to her bed. But instead I leave her on the couch and take the bed for myself because I can’t sleep next to someone else when it used to mean so much. Quinn’s bed is big and soft and we’ve spent a lot of time playing under these covers—creating tunnels and oceans and whatever else eight-year-olds can make out of a blanket. Today I think I just want them to swallow me like a big whale.

My phone buzzes and I groan, expecting it to be Quinn, yelling at me for leaving her in the living room.

But it isn’t. It’s a text from Santana.

 **[From: Santana]** _Got your message._

I sit up in the bed, throwing the covers off me like they’re made of lava. I don’t know what to do—how am I supposed to pick what I want to say when I want to say everything?

_Are you okay?_

There are a lot of things I want to say, but they can all be rearranged to make those three words. They’re important words.

 **[From: Santana]** _Yeah_.

_I mean, do you have somewhere to stay?_

**[From: Santana]** _I’m at home with my dad._

I don’t know why, but that makes me sadder than anything Santana said or I did.

_Oh. San, can we please talk?_

She takes twelve minutes to respond and I count every one of them

 **[From: Santana]** _I don’t know how long I’ll stay here. I’ll mail your key back._

 **[From: Santana]** _Maybe I’ll see you around someday._

When I pick Quinn up from the couch, she feels like a cloud. Like I might forget how to touch her at any moment because I don’t really know what it means to touch someone anymore. I thought I’d touched Santana. I was wrong.

Quinn stirs a little when I set her down on the bed. “Are you okay, B?” she breathes groggily.

“Don’t ask me that,” I whisper back, but she’s already asleep.


	10. Breaking the Law

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know, I know. It's been forever. Long story short, I went through a Brittana slump and that coincided with discovering Warehouse 13, and I'm still not over that show and now I have millions of Bering & Wells feelings. But I still also have a lot of Brittana feelings, so don't worry. I also saw that Emeli Sande is coming to Chicago and I said on Tumblr that if I got tickets to see her, I would finish this story before the show. I got tickets. The show is on October 26th. So between now and then, we have five chapters left and I expect all of you to hold me to that promise. Go to [my Tumblr](http://cargoes.tumblr.com/) and bug me every couple of days to make sure I'm actually writing, because I'm terrible at sticking to self-imposed deadlines.
> 
> (And also please enjoy this chapter. I know it's short. Enjoy it anyway.)

**10\. Breaking the Law**

_when the floor is more familiar than the ceiling_  
 _i will break in late at night_  
 _shake up how you're feeling_

My family comes home a week later.

Santana’s key comes in the mail the day after that, and I think summer ends when Quinn has to explain to my mom why I can’t stop crying.

/

I could probably come up with a really big list of things people think I’m not good at. Things like science or history or waiting. (They’re sort of wrong about that last one. I’m bad at waiting. I’m good at patience. There’s a difference.) I think if more people talked to me, they’d realize that I’m actually good at all of those things. I’m just not the _best_ at them, and when a lot of people say ‘good’, they really mean ‘best’.

But there is one thing I’m always good at, no matter what kind of definition you mean. I’m always good at people. People are not equations or dates or formulas. I’m used to not getting things because of someone else—because they don’t explain something right or because they get frustrated or because sometimes their words don’t sound the same way in my mind as I think they do in their heads.

I’m supposed to be good, better, best at people. I’m not supposed to fail at people and I still don’t understand Santana.

There are a lot of reasons for why I can barely sleep in my bed anymore, and they’re the same reasons for why I never want to leave it either.

It’s a good thing my mom gets me. I like genetics.

“Taco night, pumpkin,” she says as she knocks on my door.

“Maybe later, mom,” I mumble. I curl away from her but she sits on my bed anyway.

“Okay. That’s fine.”

“But you should totally go eat.”

“I will.”

“You know—like, now.”

“I just have a question for you.”

“Mom…”

“You had a big summer romance while I was away and I just think we should talk about it.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I reply, but I know she won’t take no for an answer. My voice is little like when you’re seven and you scrape your knee and you just want your mom to kiss it better. I know it won’t actually make anything better. I knew it when I was seven. But sometimes you just need your mom.

“Indulge me for a second, sweetie.”

I roll over and wipe my eyes. “Are you gonna ask me ‘why Santana’?”

“Yes.”

“Then I _really_ don’t want to talk about it.”

“I don’t mean it the way other people might, Brittany. You know that.” She runs her hand through my hair and I almost let myself be seven years old again. “Tell me why Santana. Tell me why she was special.”

“She _is_ special, Mom; it’s not like she’s dead or anything. She just…” I shrug. “I got so used to her being here and now she’s gone and it feels like my skin doesn’t fit. Okay?”

She kisses my hair and it’s different from how Santana kisses me but it breaks my heart just the same. “Okay. I’ll make you a plate; you can warm it up when you’re ready.”

“‘Kay.”

I go back to sleep instead.

/

School comes quicker than I wanted it to. One day it’s July and I’ve got a great girl in my bed, and the next it’s September and all I have is a lumpy mattress that I won’t let Quinn share with me. She thinks it’s because I’m pushing her away, but I know it’s because she always complains about her back whenever she sleeps in my bed. (And also I’m a psychology major—she doesn’t have to tell me when I’m pushing her away.)

A lot of psychology majors are double majoring in other stuff, mostly things like criminal justice and whatever else has to do with the law. Psychology majors are over-achievers, I think, or they’re like me and they’re personally invested in the subject. I care too much about psychology to also care about something else. I really, really just want to be a psychologist, and I know I’ll be a good one.

I also really, really want to find Santana, so it’s a good thing that these criminal justice, double-majoring, over-achiever types like me. Maybe they’re not cops or secret agents or whatever yet, but they all have one useful quality in common, and that is that, like all psychology majors, they’re sneaky. Only they’re extra sneaky because of the secret agent stuff.

I ask them what they would do if they had a friend who disappeared off the face of the planet and they wanted to find them (just to make sure they were okay, I adamantly insist.)

They all tell me to contact the police if I’m really worried, and I give them at least five reasons for why that’s the worst idea ever. (Four of those reasons are just that Santana would never forgive me, and I might have already done one unforgivable thing to her, so it’s not a risk I need to take again.)

Dave, a junior from Iowa, eventually suggests staking out the restaurant she works at. I tell him that’s creepy. (Three days later, my mom tells me she doesn’t work there anymore and that the hostess was really bitchy about it.)

Cassie tells me I should keep calling her, and when I say that I think Santana changed numbers to avoid me, she only looks at me weirdly for a second before she asks if Santana has a land line. (She does. Her dad keeps answering and I hang up every time.)

There’s this kid Tim that no one really talks to because he has a way of making you uncomfortable really easily. It’s why I don’t ask him for help, but one night he sends me an email saying that he can get Santana’s address if I want it, and it takes me a while to answer. I do want it. I really want it. But that kind of feels like overstepping a big line and I don’t want Santana to get mad at me again if I finally find her.

I tell him yes anyway. Her anger is worth it. She’s worth it, more than twice over. A month later, I have her house address as well as her aunt’s, plus her aunt’s phone number.

I don’t ever talk to Tim again.  I do call her aunt’s house. Turo answers and I wish he didn’t sound as much like my little brother as he actually does.

Santana isn’t there anyway, and Quinn tells me that I’m the one being creepy now and she doesn’t mean it in a sort-of-affectionate way.

She’s right.

/

“Britt…”

“I don’t want to.”

“It’s just one night.”

“So we’ll do it some other time.”

“It isn’t a movie or a concert, Britt. I’m not trying to set you up with anyone.”

“Okay, well, you can not-try another time.”

“It isn’t even anything fun. It’s just a lecture.”

“About what?”

“‘Gender Identity in _The Dancers Dancing_.’”

“What’s that?”

“A book about Irish teenagers in the 1970s. It’s all political criticism and puberty metaphors.”

“That sounds boring.”

“You won’t understand a word of it.”

“Okay.”

/

Quinn is right. I don’t understand anything because I’m not paying attention to anything at all after the speaker says the author’s name. It’s a weird name and I tugged Quinn’s notes off her lap when he said it because I wanted to see how it was spelled. The reason I’m not paying attention is I don’t understand how a word can have a hard g-sound when there are no g’s in it at all. Quinn will probably tell me that it’s because her name is in Gaelic and Gaelic is a weird language ( _and English is just as weird, Britt_ , she’ll tell me, but at least it’s a weird that I can understand.)

It isn’t that I dislike other languages. I think they’re pretty cool. It’s just sometimes I get so fixated on really little details. When I first started taking French in high school, I always turned my tests in late because I spent so much time putting accents in the exact right place at the exact right angle, especially those backwards ones that were a lot more confusing than the normal ones. My teacher always said that I had a great diacritical eye, and I didn’t learn until college what that actually meant.

Madame Moreau—that was my French teacher—used to conspire with one of my English teachers to persuade me to get a degree in English because of my eye for detail. The only problem was that I got bored with writing really quickly, and the details were the only things I was good at in both classes. I passed with B’s in senior year but only because Quinn tutored me until we both hated each other.

Anyway, the kind of detail you need for writing is the wrong kind, I think. I don’t care about word details or grammar details as much as I care about people details. That’s why I’m so good at psychology, because it’s all about people details. When you mess with details in writing, you change words to evoke certain feelings. Details in psychology reveal feelings that you might never have expressed in words.

I like that.

“What’d you think?”

Quinn nudges my shoulder, and I follow her out of our aisle of seats. “Do you know much about Irish phonetics?”

“No?”

“That author, Elfish Givenchy—”

“Éilís Ní Dhuibhne.”

“Right. She has a weird name.”

“Oh yeah, hey—do you still have my notes?”

“Yep.”

“Okay, well can I have them back?”

“Can we go to the library?”

“Britt, you’re not making sense.”

“I want to know more about Gaelic.”

Quinn furrows her brows and stops walking, parking right in front of me so I almost tip over trying not to run into her. “Were you listening to anything about that lecture?”

“Did it talk about Gaelic?”

“No.”

“Then no, I wasn’t.”

“Then why are you so interested?”

“I found something I don’t understand and I want to understand it. Is there something wrong with that?”

Quinn keeps her quizzical gaze for a moment more before shaking her head. “No, it’s fine; it just surprised me.” She glances at her watch. “You have a clinical study in twenty minutes, remember?”

I frown and stamp my foot. “Shoot.”

(It’s a clinical study on memory. I don’t care about it now as much as I did when I was formulating it last semester.)

“I can check out some books for you, if you just promise me one thing.”

I narrow my eyes. “Depends on what that thing is.”

“Let me cook dinner for you, and eat it with me. At the same time, at the same table—the whole shebang.”

“I might be home late.”

“I’ll eat a snack.”

“What are you gonna make?”

“I think it’s time for the first mac and cheese night of the year, and I seem to have a surplus of bacon.”

I finally crack a smile when she butts her shoulder into mine. “Okay. Thanks, Quinn.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I meant for—”

“I know.”

/

The house smells warm and comforting when I get home. Quinn doesn’t cook much because she writes a lot and she doesn’t eat when she writes, but she always makes the best macaroni and cheese. My whole family eats the stuff out of the box and they don’t like things in it, but that’s just because they’ve never had Quinn’s mac and cheese. She always puts bacon in, and onions too most of the time, and sometimes peas if I’m sad. The green of peas and the yellow of the sauce is one of my favorite color combinations. There should be more art made with those kinds of green and yellow, I think.

The bowl Quinn hands me is huge and I’m sure I’ll never eat the whole thing, except that’s what I say every time and I haven’t been right yet.

“This is amazing, Quinn.”

“I’d be flattered if that wasn’t the same thing you always say about my mac and cheese.”

“Just because I keep saying it doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

“I’m just saying, maybe come up with some alternatives for ‘amazing’.”

“You’re the English major. You come up with them.”

Quinn laughs and almost loses a noodle down her shirt. “Are you coming with me to the department Halloween party this year? Prescott’s hosting, he says he’s really looking forward to more of your weird theories about _The Great Gatsby_.”

I swallow my mouthful of food. “That guy was totally black.”

Quinn rolls her eyes the same way she always does when I bring this up. “He totally wasn’t, Britt.”

“Well, don’t tell Dr. Prescott that. I’ve almost got him convinced.”

“So are you coming or not?”

“Yeah, probably,” I shrug. “I mean, I don’t have anything planned right now but something might come up. It’s a while away.”

“No,” Quinn says slowly, “it’s in a week.”

I put down my fork. “No way; it’s still September. I’ve been dating all my papers like that.”

“Britt—”

“When did it get to be October?!”

“About three weeks ago?” Quinn ventures.

“Seriously, Quinn.”

“Seriously, Britt,” she echoes. “Did you really think it was September?”

I blush and turn my attention back to dinner. “I guess I’ve been busy,” I mumble.

“With what?”

“Stuff. School. What does it matter?”

“Okay.” Quinn nods her head and doesn’t look at me and the only sounds for the next few minutes are our forks when they scrape against our bowls. “Have you talked to her?” she finally murmurs.

“Turo said she’s not living with them.”

“Yeah, but—”

“She doesn’t want to talk to me, okay, Quinn? She doesn’t want me to find her, so I guess I don’t need to keep looking.”

I get up and shovel the rest of my macaroni into my mouth as I take the bowl back to the kitchen. It could have used more peas.

“Thanks for dinner.”

/

I sort of lied when I said I wasn’t looking for her anymore. Santana has a Facebook because everyone has a Facebook at some point. She hasn’t updated it in about a year but that doesn’t mean I can’t check it every night before bed. I call it hope.

(And it hurts.)


	11. Next To Me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for all the nagging, you guys! I'm pretty sure at least five people bugged me about updating and look where it got us. A new chapter updated just over a month after the previous one. That's getting closer to the update schedule of old, eh? Anyway, I think they'll be easier to write after this. But still, keep nagging me. Hope you enjoy!

**11\. Next To Me**

_when the end has come and buildings falling down fast;_  
 _when we spoiled the land and dried up all the seas;_  
 _when everyone has lost their heads around us;_  
 _you will find her, you'll find her next to me._

Sometimes I feel like the world isn’t real.

Or maybe my world is real but nobody else’s is. Or maybe my world and the other world exist in different dimensions and they only touch sometimes.

November is that kind of month, I think. It’s like, Halloween’s over and Thanksgiving is next but so is Christmas and that’s the holiday that people are focusing on. November is the month that doesn’t exist.

It doesn’t exist but it still happens, and I still have to work my way through it, so I try not to think about it too hard.

Most of my time is spent working on my senior study. Quinn refused to be a part of it when I asked her, which I guess is okay because she’s the kind of person who would try and find a way to beat the test. I mean, it’s not really anything you can beat, but she’d probably still find a way. Quinn’s sneaky like that.

It’s a memory test. Last year, I put a bunch of people in the same situation and then asked them to describe it right afterwards. This time I’m sitting down with them again and asking the same questions. Memory changes a lot, even if you don’t think it does. I just want to know how.

I want to sit Santana down and ask her how she remembers the summer.

(I haven’t decided yet if I want her memories to be different from mine.)

/

“Mom, we don’t have to Skype every time you want to talk. I haven’t left the state and I do have a phone.”

“I just like to make sure that you’re okay, Brittany. Especially after what happened over the summer.”

I roll my eyes (which I would do a lot more if we were talking on the phone). “You don’t know what happened over the summer.”

“Well, all the more reason for me to check up on you.”

“Can we talk about something else, please?”

“Alright. How’s your study going?”

“It’s okay. People’s memories are weird. I’ve read all these articles where scientists think memories are like a file cabinet or a computer but I don’t think that’s right. You remember all those ‘choose your own adventure’ books I used to read?”

My mom throws her head back and laughs. She always does; I don’t think she knows how to laugh quietly. “Yeah, you mean those books you used to cheat at? You would always go to the end and pick out the best adventure.”

“Well I don’t want to go on an adventure where I lose,” I counter. “I think people remember like that. They have all the basic details down but then they kind of adjust the memory to something cooler. And then when they tell the story so many times, no one bothers to check them on it.”

“Ah, but that’s why we have home videos. So even if someone wanted to say they were so scared of fireworks they fell in a pool, _I_ really know they wet their pants.”

I point a finger warningly at the computer screen. “Hey, I was four and those things were loud. You watch it or I won’t come home for Thanksgiving.” The doorbell rings and my eyes dart to the hook where Quinn keeps her keys because sometimes she locks herself out of the house. But they aren’t there so I don’t know who could be at the door. “Hold on, Mom. I’ll be right back.”

She waves me off and I jog over to the front room.

“Don’t ring the bell; I have my keys! I told you I’d be right there!” Quinn yells from outside and I hesitate before opening the door because all of this is very weird.

But I open it anyway because I’ve always been way too curious, and I’m glad I am because Mike Chang is standing on my front stoop, smiling.

“Mike, what are you doing here?”

“Oh, you know, I was in the neighborhood. Thought I’d drop by.”

“You go to school in Chicago but you were in the neighborhood?”

“I called him,” Quinn huffs, finally making it to the door. “And he was supposed to wait for me because it was going to be a surprise—”

“Oh, I’m totally surprised,” I interject.

“See? She’s totally surprised,” Mike says. “Besides, it’s way too cold to wait.” He raises his eyebrows pointedly and I step back to let them in.

“Good to see you, Britt,” he grins, wrapping me up in a hug the moment Quinn closes the door.

“Is that Mike Chang?”

Mike stiffens and pulls back, holding me at arm’s length. “Did you say something?”

“Nope,” I answer, trying not to laugh.

“I did though,” my mom says from the computer.

Mike looks up at the ceiling, trying to place her voice. “Mrs. Pierce?”

“Technology is a wonderful thing, isn’t it, Mike?” He finally finds the computer and we all have a good laugh.

“Mom, I’ll call you later, okay? Or I’ll just see you tomorrow when we get home.”

“Alright, sweetie. Love you.”

“Love you, too.” I shut my computer and turn back to Mike. “So what are you really doing here?”

He shrugs. “Quinn called, thought a Thanksgiving road trip back to Lima might be fun.”

I narrow my eyes at his smirk. “I know what you’re doing.”

“Is it working?”

“Yep.”

/

Quinn doesn’t really like to drive on long car trips anymore. I know she loves me because she offers to drive first thing when we get up on the first day of Thanksgiving break. Mike offers about a thousand times to take the wheel but Quinn refuses every one. So instead we pile into her tiny car, shove all of our laundry into the trunk and passenger seat, and Mike and I sit in the back.

Halfway through the drive, after we’ve all had something to eat and we’re in that quiet post-food haze, Mike grabs my feet and pulls them into his lap.

“Been dancing much lately?” he asks quietly.

“No, I’ve had a lot of schoolwork to do.”

He clicks his tongue, feigning disapproval. “Gotta keep limber or you’re gonna go all stiff and next summer will be a total drag.” He takes off my shoes and I wiggle my sock-covered toes. “You know what I like about hip hop dancing?” he asks as he massages my feet. I yawn and shake my head. “It’s all about the beat, right? You’ve got to be so exact in hitting your moves. You’ve got to have conviction about where you stomp because you miss one step and it throws all your tricks out of sync. It’s like doing it right keeps you grounded.”

He squeezes my big toe and I giggle. “Did you bring your speakers with you?”

“You know I don’t go anywhere without them.”

I kick at him lightly and push myself back to a sitting position. “Quinn…?”

“Yeah, I got it,” she answers from the front seat. “I’ll find a rest stop.”

/

The nice thing about rest stops in Ohio is they’re all surrounded by fields just waiting for someone to dance in them.

Twenty minutes later, the bottoms of my pants stained with dusty dirt, I feel more grounded than I have in weeks.

/

My dad has a lot of siblings and they all live mostly in the area so we rotate who hosts Thanksgiving every year. This is important thirty minutes outside of Lima because I can’t remember if it’s our year to host and I don’t know if I want it to be or not. My palms are sweating and that’s coming down pretty hard on the ‘not’ side, but my heart is beating really fast and it won’t tell me exactly why. Sometimes fear feels just like hope.

Inside I’m making pros and cons lists; I’m tearing petals off flowers and flipping a thousand quarters. Outside, my knee jumps and I can’t figure out what to do with my hands.

Quinn drops me off first, waving to my dad who’s sitting on the stoop just like he always does when I come home from a break. My mom is the one who wants to Skype at least twice a week, but my dad is always in his rickety chair, arms folded and chin tucked to his chest. He hides behind a baseball cap I know is almost as old as I am and it always looks like he’s sleeping but he’s not. I know he’s not because he always waves back.

I grab my stuff and haul it up the steps. “What, you’re not gonna help?” I tease.

My dad huffs a laugh and gives me a brief hug before taking my bag and hefting it over his shoulder. “Track’s empty,” he says as we go inside. “Has been for a few weeks.”

“Yeah, that’s because everyone is afraid it’s gonna snow and mess up their bikes.”

“It’s not snowing now.” He grabs my helmet from the hall closet and tosses it to me. “I put the bikes on the trailer already.”

I flip the helmet in my hands a few times before answering. “I get the red one.”

He cocks his head and smiles. “It’s too big for you, just like it was last time.”

“Yeah, but that one’s totally better,” I pout. “You’re gonna win if you get that one.”

“Ride faster,” he winks, walking out the door and clicking the remote to his pickup.

We don’t talk much on the drive over. My mom is a constant chatterbox—like, she could probably talk for three days straight if someone gave her the chance. I don’t mind it. Sometimes I feel like talking a lot. But my dad is quiet and that’s nice, too.

There’s a crappy little house by the track where people change into their motocross gear. It wants to be a locker room, but it isn’t big enough and there isn’t enough interest in the sport for anyone to actually make it one. So it’s just the tiny house by the track with a lopsided window and too many holes in the wood slats.

I got into motocross sort of because of my mom, but she doesn’t like to come to meets when I have them. They make her nervous. They’re also the only time she ever shuts up. Well, I guess except for when she’s sleeping, but she might talk in her sleep too, so. But when I was a kid—back when she still didn’t really understand me—she went to all these child specialists and psychologists and one of them said that maybe I should get involved in a sport because dancing was kind of a solitary thing and sports might help me relate to other people more. But I never liked going to my brother’s soccer games because kids playing sports makes parents shout a lot and turns them really mean.

My dad had been fixing up this old bike of his in the garage—the red one, the one he still won’t let me ride by myself—and I asked him about it one day because it was shiny but also it reminded me of a cardinal. He took me for a ride on it and let me sit between him and the handlebars, and even though my mom yelled at him ( _because what if you flipped, Frank_ ), he still smiled and took me out a couple more times before I asked if I could have my own bike.

Motocross still bothers my mom because it’s pretty dangerous, but sometimes it also bothers her because out of all the sports she wanted me to join, I ended up picking another solitary one.

She doesn’t believe me when I tell her I didn’t do it on purpose. Probably because I smile too much when I say it.

Dad always looks funny when he puts on all his stuff because he’s had the same helmet and goggles since he first started racing and they’re really big and dated. But he loves them a lot and I can’t wait to look silly and dated in twenty years.

“I’ll give you a head start,” he winks as he tosses me my helmet.

“No way,” I smile back. “I don’t need one.”

“We’ll see about that.”

Dad tells me all the time that I should get into freestyle because I already have the flair for acrobatics. But I can do that with my body on the ground, and I can do it better and for longer. I like motocross because I like speed. I like the rush of going fast, that little moment of panic when I first shoot off even though I’ve raced a hundred times before and I know what I’m doing. I like darting past everyone right out of the gate even though Dad tells me I don’t need to show off so much. I’m really good at motocross. I’ve won more than a few tournaments. Of course I need to show off.

Dad won more tournaments when he was my age. It’s kind of nice to know that after the crazy summer I had, after all the weird things I’ve been feeling, I can still feel the small pang of defeat when he crosses the finish line before me. His smug smile is an odd comfort.

“One of these days you’ll take me up on that head start,” he says when we stop.

“One of these days I’ll win,” I retort.

Dad gets off his bike and puts the kickstand down, pulling a stopwatch out of one of his pockets. He jiggles it in his hand. “Time trials?”

I shake the cricks out of my shoulder and put my helmet back on. “Yeah, sure.”

The track we practice at isn’t the one we use for competitions because it’s pretty small, relatively speaking. It’s no Hawkstone Park, just a big dirt oval, but the straight stretches are deceptively small and it’s a good place to perfect your turns. I know because I still haven’t yet. There are times I still go sprawling even though I could navigate this place in my sleep.

Today is no exception. Three laps in and I bail out on the second turn, the one that always distracts me because it has the best view of the bleachers and parents that wave at you during races. No one’s waving today but I wish someone was.

I take a moment to lie on the ground, thrusting a thumbs-up into the air so my dad knows I’m not hurt.

“You always take that turn too fast,” he says, leaning over me. The gravel crunches under his boots; I can feel the sound in my ears rather than hear it. It feels like someone is chewing on the space behind my eyes, or maybe that’s just because I hit the ground harder than I thought.

“I like going fast,” I grumble. “I just hate the stopping.”

My dad’s knees crack as he squats down next to me. “Yeah, well, the faster you go, the more it hurts when you stop.” He reaches a hand down and pulls me up with him, dusting off my arms. “But you can always start again.”

I laugh and shove his shoulder. “One more race?”

“One more race,” he smiles.

“I’m taking the red one!” I yell as I jog over to his bike, leaving my dad to pick up mine.

(I win.)

/

We spend Thanksgiving at my uncle’s place and nobody asks me about anything except school.

It’s nice.

/

Christmas is a different story. If I had any say in the matter, I’d let kids complete their schoolwork from home in between Thanksgiving and Christmas because it seems silly to go back and forth that close together. But it isn’t up to me so I go back to school full of food, and I come back home a month later, hungry and tired from finals.

Christmas Eve is always at my aunt’s house but Christmas Day we spend at home and that doesn’t mean anything huge but it _could_ and that makes me want to sleep the whole break long.

Katie wakes me up obscenely early and we play _Love, Actually_ as many times as we need to until everyone else wakes up. Last year we almost got all the way through it three times.

“I didn’t get you anything too awesome this year,” she says as she settles her head on my shoulder.

“That’s okay,” I say as I pass her a plate of leftover fudge. (It’s Christmas morning; nothing counts.) “There’s no way you were gonna beat that deluxe edition of both _Sharknado_ movies anyway.”

“Oh yeah,” she laughs. “Wanna watch those instead?”

“Nah, it’s Christmas. This is what we do.”

“‘Kay.” She snuggles further into me, stretching her feet out in the opposite direction, and I smile.

The first time Colin Firth’s Portuguese housemaid shows up on screen, Katie starts squirming. She keeps readjusting her head on me so often I feel like I’ve become some sort of scratching post.

“Have you got lice or something?” I finally ask, laughing.

She huffs and readjusts again. “I’m sorry about Santana,” she mumbles.

It feels like a bee stings my heart, but just for a second. Mostly I’m just tired of people saying they’re sorry when they really don’t know anything about what happened.

But Katie’s still a kid and she probably actually means sorry instead of _I’m sorry, please tell me your sob story in great detail_ , so I brush it off and give her a reassuring pat on the arm. “It was six months ago, Katie. I’m fine.”

“Turo’s back at school,” she offers. Hugh Grant walks in on his assistant and that sleazy President and I try not to twitch my feet too much.

“You know him?” I ask.

“He’s a year ahead of me, but yeah. He’s nice.”

“Oh.”

“He says Santana’s working at some bar in town.”

I swallow a couple of times. “Good for her.”

“Do you wanna know which one?”

“No, thank you,” I whisper.

“Okay.”

“You think we’ll make it through three times this year?”

“Probably not.”

We both fall asleep before we can find out.

/

 **[From: Quinn]** _Hey, just realized I forgot to give you your present. Come over when you can_.

Quinn texts right before we sit down to dinner and I have half a mind to pop over there real quick and escape my family. (Right before they eat, the laughing turns to bickering because my mom needs my dad to do a million things and all he wants to do is carve the chicken.) But my dad shakes his head and finally pulls out the electric knife, so I roll my eyes and sit down.

_Gotta eat dinner first. Might be over late._

Late turns into really late because Mom forgot the pies and then Alex pulled out a deck of cards and with five of us I can never resist a good round of poker because everyone else stinks at it. Once Katie turns sixteen, my dad promises we can play for actual money and I can’t wait because that’s the day I start being rich.

Halfway into _The Sound of Music_ , when Alex and Katie are asleep and my mom’s busy in the kitchen making some tea, I grab my keys and jingle them in my dad’s direction, letting him know I’m going out.

“Quinn’s?”

I nod. “Who else?”

“Wish her family a Merry Christmas.”

“It’s just Quinn and her mom this year, Dad. Frannie’s still in Seattle.”

“Okay, well don’t stay out too late.”

I give him a kiss on the cheek and slip on my boots. “You got it.”

Sometimes driving in winter is slush and wind, but today the snow sparkles with the glow of streetlights and everything is quiet and calm. Tonight I put my hand out of the window because I like feeling the breeze through my gloves. This drive feels more like Christmas than anything else I’ve done today.

Quinn’s family isn’t really that festive around the holidays, but every year since I’ve known her, they’ve changed the bulb on their porch light to a really nice green. If Christmas trees glowed, they would glow like Quinn. I know she likes Christmas in her own way.

Her stoop hasn’t been shoveled but it hasn’t snowed that much either, so I have a little fun crunching in it while I wait for her to answer the door.

“Merry Christmas,” she says.

I look up and smile. “Hey, you too.” I point down to my snow masterpiece. “I made a heart out of my boot prints.”

“A heartprint,” Quinn laughs.

“Yeah, that.”

She opens the door wider and I step in, stomping my feet on her mat so I don’t get snow all over her house.”

“I don’t see a present,” I tease.

Quinn chuckles. “Straight to the point, I see. It’s upstairs. There’s hot cocoa on the stove; make yourself a mug and I’ll be right back.”

“Okay.”

Quinn’s kitchen is just about the only place in her house that looks a little messy because ever since her dad left, Quinn’s mom has been trying to teach herself to cook. She’s not very good and it takes a long time to make one meal, but it’s nice to see her make an effort. Sometimes Quinn will tell me that she had dinner at home and it tasted good, and I know that means more to her than just a meal. Quinn probably misses her mom like Santana misses her dad.

My favorite mug is usually on the second shelf in the cups cabinet, but I guess someone must have used it already today because it isn’t there. I find it in the dishwasher and give it a rinse because I’m not sure if that load is clean. I mean, it’s just a mug, but you never know. I can hear Quinn coming down the stairs as I pour hot cocoa all the way to the top.

“I think I’m gonna microwave this a bit,” I say as she stops by the door behind me. “It isn’t good hot cocoa if it’s only lukewarm.”

“That makes sense,” she replies, only it isn’t Quinn and I’m suddenly too nervous to turn around.

My heart-sense has been tingling today but I thought that was just because it’s Christmas. I don’t think I’ve ever tricked myself before.

The microwave beeps and I jump, reaching for the mug with jittery hands and a pulse that doesn’t know how to calm down.

Holding onto the cup of cocoa is like touching a flame, and eventually I have no other choice but to turn around and face one as well.

“Hi, Santana.”


	12. River

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you guys don't follow me on Tumblr, then you don't know that Emeli Sande's show was cancelled and that makes me upset. Don't worry; I'll try and finish this as close to Saturday as I can, hopefully no later than sometime next week. Who knows, maybe I'll just write through my sadness and knock it all out on time. (Don't hold me to that. You know how I am with deadlines.) Hope you enjoy! Three chapters left after this one :)

**12\. River**

_see, i can't make the load much lighter;_   
_i just need you to confide in me._   
_but if you're too proud to follow rivers,_   
_how you ever gonna find the sea?_

“You look nice.”

“Thanks.

“Do you want some? There’s more in the pot.”

“I’m good, thanks.”

“Okay.”

I sip my cocoa and stare at her because I don’t know what else to do.

“Did Quinn call you?”

Santana shoves her hands in her pockets and leans against the counter. “No, um, I kind of broke into her room? I was actually pretty surprised that her mom didn’t hear me. I made a lot of noise falling through the window.”

“Judy’s kind of oblivious sometimes.”

“Yeah.”

“How did you get Quinn’s address?”

“Does it matter?”

“I’m just curious.”

“You can find anything if you search hard enough.”

“I couldn’t find you.”

“What?”

I shake my head and drink some more cocoa. “So, how’s the bar? Louie’s, right?”

“Wh—? It’s fine, Britt. I come home smelling like beer every night, but it’s fine.”

“Where’s home?”

“What?”

“I mean, I’m not looking for your street address or anything, but are you still living with your aunt, or are you back with your dad? How’s he doing?”

Santana presses two fingers to her temple and sighs. “Can you stop asking me questions like we’re friends?”

“We _are_ friends.”

“We’re not friends, Britt. We’ve never been friends.”

“We’ve always been friends. Well, ever since we started talking. I don’t think you can be friends with someone you’ve never met. Or maybe friendship is dormant all the time and it’s only when you finally meet someone that it activates. Like a friend-volcano.”

“Brittany…”

“Oh, you weren’t finished?”

“Well, I hope not. I wanted to talk.”

“You know, that volcano thing actually kind of makes sense. You erupted and then went dormant again and then we didn’t talk for a really long time.”

“I erupted because you set me off.”

“That’s not fair, Santana.”

“I know, I just—I’m trying to tell you something, Britt. Can you listen?”

“I never stopped listening.”

Santana sighs again and runs a hand through her hair. “Britt, you’re being really frustrating. I’m trying to tell you something important.”

My hot cocoa is lukewarm again. I should have microwaved it for longer. I guess that’s what you get for trying to heat things with a lamp—a scalding first sip, and a lot of tepid ones after.

I put the mug down on the counter even though I feel like smashing it on Quinn’s perfect tiles. “Why should I listen to you? Why are you even here?” I finally murmur.

Santana cocks her head, confused, like I gave her an apple when she was expecting an orange. “I have to tell you something,” she repeats.

“You could have told me a lot of somethings a lot sooner. You didn’t have to break into Quinn’s house to do it.”

Santana narrows her eyes. “You’re angry.”

“Yeah, I’m angry. You left without letting me explain, without letting me talk, and now you want me to let you?”

“No, I—”

“I know you don’t think you’re a nice person, Santana, but I never thought you were mean.” I roll my neck back, letting it creak and snap. My brain is sitting heavy on it today. I know I’m twenty two, but right now I feel old. “Let’s go to the living room, okay? I don’t want to stand.”

Santana nods and follows me like a scolded dog. There’s really only one couch in the Fabray house worth sitting on because this room doesn’t get used very much. Santana picks an armchair that could be comfy if the cushions weren’t so hard. I stretch out on the sofa. It feels like it could suck me under any second.

(If Santana keeps looking at me like that, I might let it.)

“So. What did you want to say?”

“Britt, can you stop interrogating me?”

“Only if you start from the beginning and tell me where you’ve been.”

Santana twists the skin on her right middle finger. “Britt, I’m not very good at explaining myself. I kind of have to do things a certain way. Don’t you trust that I’ll eventually tell you all of that stuff?”

“No.”

“What?”

“Why would I trust you, Santana?” I shrug. “I don’t think you meant to do it, but you kind of took advantage of me all summer.”

Santana immediately bristles. “Look, _you’re_ the one who let me stay at your house; if you—”

I roll my eyes. “That’s not what I’m talking about. Of course I didn’t mind you staying. I wouldn’t have offered if I did. But you’re so good at playing with people’s emotions and I didn’t notice until I was too in love with you to care.”

“Was?”

“What did you come here to say, Santana?” I repeat.

“I wanted to say I was sorry.”

“So say it.”

“Why are you being so hostile?”

“Did you think I was going to listen with a smile?”

“I didn’t think you were going to be an asshole about it.”

“I think I’ve kind of earned the right to be an asshole. You were angry at me and instead of letting me talk, like you’re trying to do now, you ran away and didn’t speak to me.”

“Okay, I ran away because you started snooping around the hospital and invaded some major privacy lines, so…”

“Can we not start pointing fingers, Santana? Because that’s not going to make talking any easier.”

“I’m just saying, I’ve got a right to be angry, too.”

“Why, because I went to the hospital and your dad turned a ten second, nonverbal interaction into some giant delusion?”

“You’re not a saint, Brittany.”

“What?”

“Look, you tried hard to relate to me and that was nice, but it’s just—my life is so different from yours in ways that you don’t really understand. I don’t really talk to anyone else because I already have the problems of four people to worry about. My dad is an actual drug addict and I have to change his sheets because when he takes a piss at night he forgets to get off the bed. I stopped flushing his pills a long time ago because he just steals more from work.”

“Don’t try and make me pity you, Santana—”

“God, Brittany, that’s what you don’t understand; I don’t _want_ you to pity me. I’m telling you that this is just the way my life is—I’m not someone to save, I’m not something to fix, and my life sure as hell isn’t a game to win. You can’t just drop by my dad’s hospital on a whim and not expect me to be pissed off. If I was looking for someone to change me, I would have found a therapist.”

“Then why did you even say yes to me in the first place? What was this summer to you?”

“I needed some place to stay, okay; if it was between a stranger and a sleazy motel—”

“That’s it? I was just a free, clean room to you?”

“No! Jeez, would you let me finish a thought?” I just wait. “Thanks,” Santana mumbles. She scratches at the back of her neck and finally starts talking. She won’t look at me at all.

“I am sorry,” she says. “I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t have left the way I did.”

“You shouldn’t have left at all,” I counter.

Santana smiles to herself, like she was expecting me to say that. “I think I kind of had to,” she mumbles.

“No, you didn’t.”

“What was I gonna do, Britt; live with you forever? What about when you went back to school? What about when your family came back?”

“We’d have figured something out.”

“Because I’m a problem to solve, right?”

“Santana—”

“Do you remember what you said to me that first night, when we were sitting outside of that motel?”

“That you were too tiny to beat up Finn?”

(God, I’d forgotten how pretty she was when she smiled.)

“Yeah,” she chuckles. “But also you said that you weren’t like everyone else, that you weren’t trying to fix me.”

“Well, I wasn’t. I’m not.”

“Except that you kind of are.” Santana fidgets in her chair, finally settling into the corner. With her legs crossed and her head propped on some fingers, she looks like some serious executive about to give me really bad news. But her eyes are tired and afraid and they’re the reason I’m still listening. “It’s just who you are, Britt,” she shrugs. “You said you just wanted to be my friend and that worked until we became a thing.”

“Are you saying you wish we hadn’t?”

“No, Britt—no. I’m not saying that. I’m saying that when other people try and fix me or be friendly or any of that kind of crap, they do it for themselves. They do it because they want someone else to notice them and think they’re a good person for even talking to me. When you said you weren’t like that, I believed you. And then it started feeling like it has with everyone else, and I didn’t know you well enough to know that you’re actually different. I’m sorry it took so long for me to realize that.”

“Me, too,” I whisper. I sigh and sit up. “You could have just told me, San.”

“I know,” she says, ruffling a hand through her hair. “I’m really sorry, Britt. I wish I had something else to say.”

I nod my head slowly and pick at my fingers. It’s a habit my mom keeps trying to break because it’s not polite and it’s not hygienic and it’s just not flattering, Brittany; your nails look like they’ve been attacked. But I can’t help it because when I get nervous I don’t like to stay still and it’s not really practical for me to run around like I want to. When I get nervous I just want to move because moving is a distraction. Santana makes me want to run marathons.

“If I ask you something, will you promise to give me an honest answer?”

Santana scrunches her eyebrows, her lips drawing down in a pout, and I shouldn’t want to kiss her, but I do. “I’ll promise to try,” she says carefully.

“What do you want?”

I guess I expected her to get angry or clam up or be defensive or something because that’s what Santana does sometimes. But not this time. This time she smiles and I have to really control my breathing or else I might faint.

“I want us to talk again,” she smiles bashfully. “I want to start over and not be a dick about everything this time.”

But I shake my head. “No, forget about me. You spend so much time wanting things for Izzy and Turo and other people. I want to know what you want for _you._ Whatever you want, not just—not just me. Like, everything that you could ever want: what is it?”

Santana uncrosses her legs, crosses them again and drums her fingers against the chair. She frowns a little more and I watch her cry. I want to stop it but I don’t think it’s my place.

“I want to love you,” she murmurs hoarsely.

“You don’t?”

Santana shakes her head, jerky little twitches that make her look small. “I don’t mean it like that,” she says. “I mean it like, like—I love my dad,” she explains, “even though I don’t want to. And I don’t need to want to love Izzy and Turo because I already do. But you, you smile that dopey smile or I watch you draw stupid faces on your pancakes and, _god_ , I want to love you so much.”

“San—”

She shrugs again and wipes away a few tears. “That’s what I came here to say, Britt. I miss you, and I’m sorry about everything, and I want to love you.”

(Sometimes I get this feeling like I’m floating and it takes my brain a couple moments to decide if it wants to fly higher or fall.

And this time it’s like, how am I supposed to fly higher when I’m already pushing the limits of the exosphere?)

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah,” I nod, “okay. That’s what you wanted to say, but there’s a lot more that I need to hear. And I want to listen, just not tonight because it’s Christmas and I’m tired and Katie’s probably eaten all the peanut butter cookies by now.”

“Okay…?”

I get up and stretch my back. “There’s this thing my family does every year on the day after Christmas. We all regift our worst presents and it’s a really laidback thing; Alex and Katie always invite a couple of friends, and Mike and Quinn come over, too. Stay here tonight. Frannie’s not home; I’ll tell Quinn you’re taking her room. And if you want to keep talking…I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Santana gets up too, clasping her hands in front of her and fiddling with her fingers. “Sure. Tomorrow.”

I nod and give her a little wave as I walk toward the front door. It doesn’t work so well because she follows me.

“San, I said stay here,” I chuckle.

“Yeah, I know,” she mumbles. “But it seems rude not to walk you to the door.”

“Oh. Okay, thanks.”

She watches me put on my shoes and it’s good someone’s got eyes on them because I’m fumbling so bad I can barely slide my toes in the hole.

When I stand up again, she’s glancing nervously at the door frame. I follow her gaze—mistletoe. Probably Judy’s tiny way of contributing to a holiday that mostly makes her sad.

Santana looks at me with caution, like I’m going to take back everything I’ve said just because there happens to be mistletoe above us. I watch her squirm and I can see that girl who taught me how to survive monster movies; the girl who watched crappy movies with me and woke up early in summer just to wish me a good morning.

I lean forward and kiss her cheek.

“Merry Christmas, Santana.”

/

Quinn calls me the second I close the door.

“Were you listening at the top of the stairs or something?” I ask. She knows I mean ‘hello.’

“No, I’ve got a bug in the living room,” she retorts drily. “This doesn’t look like the happy reunion I was hoping for.”

“Oh, were you actually hoping for it?”

“If I wasn’t, I’d have kicked her out of my house. Which brings me to an interesting point: why is she still _in_ my house?”

I laugh and start my car. “She’s coming over tomorrow.”

“With me?”

“Yeah, so try and de-Frannie Frannie’s room tonight, would you?”

“How do you know she’s not already up there?”

I roll my eyes and flick on my turn signal. “Please, Santana’s got at least another twenty minutes of sulking by the window before she even thinks about finding you.”

“And she’s sulking because…?”

“Because I foiled her big romantic gesture.”

“You buzzkill.”

“Well, it wasn’t _that_ romantic.”

“Okay. Do you want it to be?”

“We’ll see tomorrow.”

“Britt…”

“What?”

Quinn scoffs. “Please, don’t try to be coy with me. You’re not gonna decide anything at the last minute. You already know what you’re gonna do.” (My house is dark and my driveway’s cold. It’s a good place to be quiet.) “Right?”

I smile even though Quinn can’t see me. Sometimes just smiling for myself makes me feel better. “Thanks for texting, Quinn,” I say, and then I get out of the car.

The snow has stopped falling. Lights are out everywhere. It’s six minutes into December 26th and the world has stopped. There is no wind and my scarf hangs flat against my jacket.

When I breathe in really deep, the cold air knocks everything out of my lungs. Spring has the rep as the season of rejuvenation, but winter is a rebirth too, I think.

/

(My brother always teases me because I dream of really weird things, like interspecies Olympics or a whole town being terrorized by Baconzilla. I like my dreams. They’re like little movies I get to watch every night for free, and I’m the one making them except I have no idea what they are.

Santana is all over my dreams tonight, and not always as a whole person. Sometimes just her lips talk to me as I watch one of my favorite movies. Or her toes wiggle when I go swimming a pool of marshmallow fluff.

I wake up way earlier than I mean to.)

/

By the time I wander downstairs the next morning, my dad is already flipping pancakes. I spend the trip down the steps and also the time it takes me to sit at the table wondering if I should tell my parents that Santana is probably coming over today.

My dad asks me three times how many pancakes I want and I end up with all the weirdly shaped rejects.

They can just be surprised like everyone else, I guess.

We all picked and wrapped our regifting presents last night, so nobody would see what we chose. They’re scattered all over the living room floor (because they don’t deserve a place under the tree) just waiting for Quinn and Mike and everyone else to add their own.

Mike shows up first just like he does every year, and my mom spends at least six minutes fussing over him and shoving a plate or two of cookies on his lap. He tells her all about his first semester because Mike really never minds talking to parents, and it’s okay because we talk enough anyway. Alex and Katie’s friends show up a few minutes later and then we’re just waiting on Quinn and Santana.

We’re waiting a while and even Mike and my parents look restless.

“Quinn is coming this year, isn’t she?” my mom finally asks.

“Yeah, of course,” I answer. But I call her anyway.

“Sorry,” she groans when she picks up. “We had to stop by Santana’s house to get something.”

“Oh, she didn’t have to—”

“She didn’t. It’ll make sense when we get there in about five minutes.” ( _It would be three if you’d let me drive,_ I hear Santana grumble in the background. I try not to laugh too much, for Quinn’s benefit.) “Do you hear that?” she says after telling Santana to shut up. “It’s been a whole night of this.”

“It has not,” Santana and I both say at the same time.

“Gross,” Quinn mumbles.

I hear their car doors slam a minute later, just as Alex and Katie start fighting for real and everyone else starts feeling kind of awkward. Quinn rings the doorbell even though she knows it’s open. She has a thing about parents.

I get up to answer the door as Katie huffs a “Finally!” and her friends giggle.

Quinn’s cheeks are red and Santana looks guilty as sin. They both come inside quickly, Quinn making a beeline for the living room. Santana shoves her hands in her pockets and rocks on her heels.

“You can take off your coat and stuff, San,” I grin.

She grins back and blushes just the slightest bit. “I didn’t want to assume…”

“What, was I gonna make you stay in your wet boots all day?” I ask, cocking my head.

“No, I just—never mind.” She peels off her boots and stuffs her scarf into the sleeve of her coat. I hang it on the banister and debate (for the tiniest, tiniest second) whether or not I should give her a hug.

Like I could ever say no. She smells like cinnamon and Quinn’s house.

“I’m glad you came,” I mumble into her shoulder.

“Me, too.” She shifts against me, her hair brushing against my neck, and I become aware of just how acutely I’ve missed her. “Your parents aren’t gonna murder me or anything, are they?”

“Well, my dad won’t,” I chuckle. “I can’t vouch for anyone else.”

“I guess that’s fair enough.”

You know how in the movies, there’s always that one scene where someone walks into a room and literally every other sound stops? Like, people quit talking, things quit moving; I’m pretty sure even air stops blowing. I always hated those scenes because that never happens.

Except today it does.

“Right so, everyone, this is Santana”—she gives a feeble little wave and drops a tiny box onto one of the chairs; I scrunch my brows at Quinn but she just shakes her head—“and we’re gonna go upstairs.”

“But don’t you—?”

“We’ll grab whatever’s left, Mom; it’s okay.”

Santana doesn’t say anything on the way up to my room. She even stops for a minute before actually walking in. I know what she’s feeling. It’s like a whole different world.

“You didn’t have to bring a bad gift.”

Santana shrugs and leans against the wall. “I thought you might make me actually sit through the whole thing.”

I smile and flop on my bed. “Oh, well in that case I think we should go back and join everyone.”

She twinkles a laugh. I think my eyes just twinkle.

“I got you something else,” she murmurs gently.

“San, you didn’t—”

“I know. But I did.” She sits down next to me on my bed and pulls something out of her bag, handing it to me. It’s a small photo album, brown with a plastic cover and no more than thirty 4x6 photos. “I know you want more answers. It’s just that I don’t want you to just ask me questions. I thought—well, I thought I might start by telling you things.”

I open the album slowly. My heart feels like it might burst out of my chest and I don’t know why. (I do know why. It’s that same fluttery surge I feel right before people get happy endings.) The first picture is a family photo. Santana’s mom is stunning. Like, that Selena, Frida Kahlo kind of pretty. Dr. Lopez looks healthy and fit and so young.

Santana is a chubby, smiling baby and I can’t help laughing.

“It’s just a couple of pictures,” she immediately deflects. “I mean, I know it’s not enough, but—”

I flip the page to find a picture of Santana’s mom pushing her on the swings. Santana has her mouth wide open and her mom is rearing her head back in a laugh. “What was her name?” I ask.

“Camila,” Santana answers. “She was named after some weird aunt that nobody actually remembers but everyone has stories about anyway.”

“You look like her.”

I feel Santana’s eyes roll almost out of her head. “Everyone says that.”

“Yeah, well, it’s true. You have her mouth.”

“Oh I do, do I?”

“Well, I am kind of an expert.”

Santana nudges my shoulder. “Are you thinking about making out with my mom?”

“No, there’s only one Lopez for me. _Where_ was this one?” I point to the picture next to it, where Santana’s parents are smiling and standing behind a very grumpy, very wet Santana.

Santana laughs and scoots closer. “That was my first trip to an amusement park; I think was seven or something. I was too little for the big rides but my parents thought I’d at least enjoy the water ones. _Big_ mistake.” She turns the page for me and if I weren’t enjoying myself so much, I’d make fun of her really obvious moves.

“Look, this one they threw a party to tell me that my mom was pregnant with Turo…”

Santana keeps talking, telling me her childhood memories in a steady flow of nostalgia. In her words I hear the girl she used to be, the girl she wants to be, the girl she is when we’re alone.

She was right. It’s not enough. But then sometimes she giggles, and it is.

Five minutes later her head is resting on my shoulder, and my hand has found hers in what little space remains between us.

Santana’s skin is warm and still summer-soft.


	13. Lifetime

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I said I was going to do a thing, so I did a thing. Okay, seven days late, but... (please enjoy.)

**13\. Lifetime**

_hey, love, can we dance together._   
_since I found you feels like time don't matter._   
_hey, love, I feel much better;_   
_you show me forever._

_you, you, you last a lifetime._

“How come you didn’t go with your brother and sister?”

“Hmm?” Santana’s voice buzzes against my neck and I grin.

“To your aunt’s house,” I clarify.

“Oh.” She sits up and cracks her back. “She was my mom’s favorite sister. She doesn’t like me very much.”

“Yeah, you said that before. How come?”

“She never really liked my dad and I might look like my mom, but I act like my dad a lot. And when my mom died…” Santana shrugs. “People have funny ways of dealing with stuff, I guess. Plus, you know, there’s the whole gay thing, and she’s always been a carbon copy of my abuela, so I guess it was kind of inevitable.”

I blink a few times. “It was inevitable?”

“Yeah.”

“It was inevitable that she’d stop loving you?”

Santana frowns. “Well, when you put it that way it sounds kind of bad, but—”

“But do you believe it?”

“I mean, you know—that’s—not always,” she stammers, blushing.

“Santana…”

“It’s how my family works, okay? Can we just get back to the part where I never stop apologizing?”

I smile sadly and shake my head. “If you want us to talk again, you’re gonna have to actually talk.”

“Crap,” Santana scowls. It’s for show, mostly, but also I think a part of her means it.

“Look, I don’t need to know your whole life story. We’ve got time for that.”

Santana looks up at me, eyes wide and shimmering, like when you catch a bubble just right in the sun. “We do?”

I cock my head. “Yeah, did you think I was gonna stop talking to you or something after today?”

Santana averts her eyes. “I don’t know,” she mumbles. “I just…don’t want to assume things.”

“You keep saying that.”

“I keep meaning it.”

“Making assumptions isn’t always a bad thing, San.”

“Oh yeah?”

I shrug. “Yeah. Like, I assume you’re here to try and win me back.”

“Britt…”

“It’s sort of working and you really haven’t even said anything yet.”

“Britt.”

“Sometimes assumptions are really just instincts, and you should listen to those a lot more.”

“I’d rather listen to you.”

I flash her a smile. “Funny, that’s what I was gonna say.” She smiles back and turns her head. “Tell me about your mom,” I say, smoothing back some of her hair.

“I thought you said you didn’t need to hear my life story.”

“Your mom isn’t your life, San.”

“Now who’s assuming things?” But she grins when she says it, so.

“Come on, I really wanna know.”

Santana sighs and moves the photo album off of her lap, scooting back on my bed and pulling me with her. I guess it’s really easy to be intimate with someone once you hit a certain point in your relationship. You never really stop assuming things, is what I mean. You kiss somebody or you sleep next to them and suddenly you’ll never forget how they like to be tickled on that one spot on their neck, and it’ll always be okay for you do it.

Santana reaches for my hand like it’s still summer and when I feel the warmth of her palm, it kind of is.

She lies down and fidgets until she gets comfy, her hair fanned out on my pillow and her hands clasped on her stomach. I lie down next to her and wiggle over until our shoulders are touching. I’d like to be closer but things have happened. It’s okay.

“You ever fall in love with a kid because they remind you of someone?”

“Yeah.”

“I think that’s how my mom felt about me sometimes. She used to go on and on about how I was a carbon copy of my dad—we laughed the same or we pouted the same or we snored the same, even though I kept telling her I don’t snore.”

“You do sometimes.”

“I think that’s why we got along so well, you know? I mean, she’d already married my dad so she knew how to relate to me and stuff.”

“That sounds nice.”

Santana hums and laughs like you do when you remember a memory that gets sadder every time you think about it.

“One time, it was raining and my dad was at work and Turo was sleeping so I had to be quiet, only I’ve never had a real easy time with that, so I was being pretty loud and annoying.  Anyway, my mom got fed up and promised to show me something cool if I could stop talking for two minutes. So I shut up and she taught me Spanish curse words until we were both laughing hysterically and Turo wasn’t sleeping anymore.”

She scratches my arm absently and if I were a cat, I’d purr. Santana laughs so maybe I did anyway.

“People are funny sometimes,” Santana says, mostly to herself. “My mom loved me because I reminded her of my dad, but my dad doesn’t love me because I look like her.”

“Your dad—”

“Britt.”

I swallow the rest of the sentence and nod softly. “Okay. Well, I don’t know your mom or your dad so they’re not the reason I love you.”

Santana doesn’t say anything and when I glance at her, she has her eyes fixed on my ceiling. I swirl my fingers over the underside of her arm, drawing flowers and stars and everything I see when I think about her. I love Santana in sunbursts and whorls, in fireworks and rolling fields of wheat. She tickles my heart like dandelions on a breeze or a cat that sits too close to the back of your neck. When she smiles I see lightyears ahead in the future and it’s all bright and warm. I think sometimes we might explode into supernovas.

“You should be loved,” I whisper. “Are you sleepy?”

Santana nods and sniffles. I pretend not to notice the second part. She turns onto her side, curling her knees as I pull the covers over both of us. I guess I expected her to face away from me, but I can see how her eyes glisten with wet. They’re still pretty. They’re always pretty.

“You smell nice,” she murmurs, playing with the ends of my hair.

“You feel nice.”

Santana laughs, thick and full of tears, before sniffling her way back to sadness. “Britt, I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

My parents taught me that you should hold people accountable for things. In a nice way, but still. And psychology has drilled into me the power of positive reinforcement, that people respond to being rewarded for doing good things. Everything I’ve learned in the past twenty two years is telling me that you’re not supposed to let people get away with stuff. You’re not supposed to give your dog that treat when he tracked mud all over the floor; you’re not supposed to let your brother watch TV before he finishes his homework.

But no adult or textbook says anything about if you’re allowed to kiss a girl who breaks your heart and then wants to take it back again. Common sense says you shouldn’t but common sense doesn’t tell you that she looks like she might deflate if you don’t kiss her; it doesn’t tell you that there’s hope and love and desperation in her lips; it doesn’t tell you what she feels like when she grabs your shirt and it definitely doesn’t tell you how her mouth is silent but her eyes are screaming.

Science doesn’t tell you a lot of things because people will tell you the rest.

Santana tastes sweet.

Santana kisses like hours and minutes mean the same thing. When I’m with her I feel like they do.

“I missed you,” she rasps when we break apart.

“I know. I missed you, too.”

“I love you,” she breathes, and it isn’t the perfect moment. She’s sad and she’s crying and she’s not even looking at me but if I wanted clichéd, sentimental moments, I’d be going out with Rachel. More than anything that Santana has ever said, I believe this.

“I love you, too. Go to sleep.”

/

Waking up next to Santana feels like the best kind of memory. I think we fell asleep for a few hours because it’s really close to getting dark again. It’s okay; that’s perfect cuddling weather.

“Mike and Quinn went home,” Santana says. “And the rest of your family went to your aunt’s house or something.”

I roll onto my side and prop myself up on my elbow. “Did they give you a status update or something?”

Santana smiles and flourishes a note. “I went to get a glass of water and I found this.”

“Cool. Did you—?” Santana just hands me another glass as she takes a sip of her own. We drink and smile in silence until I realize that there’s singing coming from downstairs.

“Did they leave the TV on?”

Santana blushes and shakes her head. “No, it was kind of quiet so I put on one of your Christmas CDs.”

I walk to the door, dragging my blanket with me. “Ooh, you found the Vanessa Williams one! My mom won’t let us play that one anymore. We wore it out when we were kids.”

“It’s been on a loop for a while,” Santana admits, smiling. “My mom was all about the 90s divas. I always loved this CD.”

I stand in the doorway and clutch my blanket tighter, watching as Santana plays with the hem of her sleeves and flicks her hair out of her eyes.

I flick my head in the direction of the stairs. “C’mon. I want to do something.”

She bunches her eyebrows together but she follows me anyway. No one else really does that. I like it.

I get down the stairs first so I open the curtains as she catches up. The backyard is beautiful, just like it always is every year. There aren’t any footprints in the snow which means that if Santana’s still here in an hour or two, we’re gonna build a snowman. She makes fire and I know how to craft snow. It’s like Paula Abdul and the cat with the sunglasses only not creepy.

“It’s pretty,” Santana says from beside me. “You were right.”

“I usually am,” I grin.

“You wanted to show me snow?”

“No. Wait.”

We drink our water, arms brushing, as we listen. The herald angels quit singing and I put my glass down as Vanessa Williams and Bobby Caldwell start singing their duet. I take Santana’s hand and spin her into the middle of the room, humming along.

“Dance with me,” I chuckle.

Santana groans and tips her head back. “I don’t dance,” she whines. “I’m a terrible dancer.”

“I don’t think it’s possible for you to be terrible at anything.”

“You haven’t seen me dance yet.”

I wrap an arm around her waist and dip her theatrically. “Okay,” I say as I pull her back up. “So I’ll do the dancing part. You can sing. _‘Beautiful, what’s your hurry…?’_ ” I lead.

Santana waits until the very last possible second to join in, smiling as she does. “‘ _Father will be pacing the floor…’_ ”

Then her eyes get that special kind of sad that only seems to come out at Christmastime and squeeze her a little closer, just because. She rests her head on my shoulder and I slow us to a gentle sway.

I clasp my hands together at the small of her back. “I don’t want you to leave again, San.”

“Me either.”

“So don’t.”

“It isn’t always that simple, Brittany.”

“Well, yeah, but neither am I.”

Santana lifts her head and scrunches her eyebrows. “Huh?”

“I mean, stay or go aren’t your only two options. You can come back, too. I can handle things.”

“You might have to keep reminding me of that, like, every day.”

“Oh, I was planning on doing that anyway. I’m very persistent.”

“Wasn’t your persistence kind of what got us into this mess in the first place?”

I pinch her side—mostly joking, but still. “Don’t push it, missy. Besides, I solemnly swear not to do that anymore.”

“Solemnly, huh?” she laughs.

“Totally,” I nod. “Cross my toes and hope to die and everything.”

She smiles and kisses me and rocks her body with mine and my eyes are closed but we’re so close I swear I can see her breathing.

“I have to tell you something though, San,” I mumble breathlessly.

“What?”

“I love you a lot but I couldn’t take it if you ran away again. I know sometimes you need space; I get that, but you’ve gotta tell me when you need it because I swear, if you just disappear I’m done.”

“Britt—”

“ _Please_ , Santana. You have to promise.”

Santana presses a finger against my lips. “Britt, if you’d let me talk, I would promise you everything. I mean, well, maybe not everything. It’s a lot to ask, you know? And it’s really easy to run. But I think—I want to stay with you more. So I’ll try.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Really hard.”

“Okay, good. Because it would have been so lame to graduate college without someone to kiss.”

“Britt…”

“And, you know, maybe I really, really missed you.”

“Me, too,” Santana replies, kissing my cheek. “What are you gonna do when you graduate?”

“I dunno, what do you feel like doing for the next five years?”

“Just five?” Santana teases.

“Five, fifty…something like that.”

“Okay.”

/

People say things about love all the time—how it’s easy or how it’s hard, how sometimes it makes you feel like a cloud and others you can’t drag yourself up from the bottom of the ocean. They make movies about love that I guess everyone is supposed to relate to, but love isn’t universal. My life would be so boring if I loved like Meg Ryan. Besides, she’s made the same movie, like, twelve times, so maybe her life has been boring twelve times.

People say things like love is friendship on fire or it’s one soul in two bodies but you can’t really make generalizations like that because love keeps changing. Sometimes love is sitting in a busy food court feeling terribly lonely and sad. Sometimes it’s yelling at each other over hot cocoa in someone else’s house.

(And sometimes love is the way your parents leave the room when they come home and see you and your girlfriend dancing to a CD that ran out of music a long time ago.)


	14. Hope

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WELL, HI AGAIN

**14\. Hope**

_at night when you turn the lights off_  
_i hope you don't cry alone._  
_i hope we stop taking for granted_  
_all of the land and all of the sea._  
_i'm taking a chance on loving;_  
_i hope that you take it with me._

I read somewhere that time gets faster the older you get because it doesn’t mean as much. Like, six months to a ninety-year-old is a lot different than six months to a six-month-old (not that six-month-olds know what time is anyway, but still.)

I feel like I’ve aged a million years in just a day because suddenly it’s almost nine and Santana’s still here and she should probably get home but I don’t want her to.

“Can you believe it’s Christmas already?” she whispers. 

“Technically Christmas was yesterday,” I answer.

“Oh, well then if I’m your Christmas present and Christmas is over, what am I still doing here?” She moves to get up but I pull her back in.

Santana giggles against my cheek and I close my eyes. “Please don’t go.”

“I will have to go back to my family at some point, Britt.”

“Yeah, but not now. They’ve seen more of you than I have these last few months." 

“I know.” 

Santana gets quiet and I wonder if she’s thinking about the months in between August and December, about how they felt wrong in little ways, like if everything was ordinary except suddenly the sky was green or the stars were gone.

I wonder if she’s thinking about time like I am, how it’s the one thing we have our whole lives that we never use. When I was twelve I wanted to invent a time machine and travel everywhere and everywhen. I was so excited about it that I made my dad build a prototype in the garage even though he only sort of knew how to use power tools. Thankfully, I lost interest before he had to learn too much.

A part of me will always want to build that time machine, I think, only now I’d use it differently. I don’t need to travel in time. I want to manipulate it, to stretch and shrink it so I can spend the right amount of time on the right amount of things. I’d slow down the months so my grandma could have more time with us. Dentist appointments would be sped up so quickly that I’d forget they even happened; same with the eye doctor. 

More than anything I’d go back and stretch out all the parts of Santana that I didn’t pay enough attention to. I could live in there forever, I think. I’d stay until I’d mapped all her freckles, recorded every voice she has, photographed the way her face changes when I tell a silly joke.

(And then I’d come back to regular time and I would know how to be with her without making her run away.)

“Do you ever think about what it would have been like if we were friends in high school?” Santana plays with a strand of my hair and it’s so adolescent that I actually think about her question. What if we were friends in high school; what if we’d had quiet moments at night like this, when you’re fifteen and stupid about a girl the way fifteen-year-olds are.

We wouldn’t have been a lot different that we are now, I don’t think, but what if we’d had the time to realize that?

“Well, glee would have won Nationals a lot more.”

“Oh, I would have been in glee club?”

“Yeah, of course.” I tickle her shoulder. “I would have made you go. I mean, I’d be there with you because I love glee club even when they’re hypothetical, but I’d have been there for you.” 

“And you think I’d listen to you?” 

“Wouldn’t you?”

Santana blushes and looks away and my heart stops but, like, in a good way, you know?

“It would have been nice,” I whisper. “Being friends with you in high school.” Santana nods like she knows I mean _and I’m sorry we wasted so much time_.

She snuggles closer to me, trying to find the perfect place for her head on my shoulder. “Kind of feels like we’re still in high school. I mean, we’ve had enough drama this year.” She laughs and kisses me. Santana makes me smile even when she’s not trying. _We’ve had too much drama_ , she says, and apologizes with a kiss. I get it. I’m glad that I get to get it.

“Tell me about us. If we had known each other back then, I mean.”

“I don’t want to,” Santana sighs. “I don’t need to focus on what we weren’t.”

“Because what we are is so much easier to deal with?” I push.

“It’s a lot less sad.”

“It is?” 

Santana sighs and looks up at my ceiling. “Britt, you’re fighting me on everything.” 

“That’s not true; there’s no way we could fight about _everything_.”

“Britt.” 

“I’m sorry, Santana. I just spent the summer fighting for you and I don’t know how to turn it off, you know?”

Santana sighs and twirls a piece of my hair around her fingers. “I know,” she murmurs. “I think, eventually, I’ll learn to love that about you.”

“Okay.”

She leans her head up to look at me. “And we are a lot less sad now than we were, I promise.”

“I know. I just—” 

(I could have loved her for four extra years. She would already know how to love the fighting part of me. We could have loved every part of each other by now.)

I don’t say any of this. I sigh instead.

“Yeah,” she agrees, sighing as well.

“We could really _be_ something, Santana. A really real something.”

“Britt, I—” She looks at me and her eyes are like asphalt in the summer, when I thought I could see magic shimmering under the heat of the sun. “ _God_ ,” she breathes, blinking her eyes, “your mouth gets me every time.”

She kisses me before I have a chance to ask her what she means, and then she lets me figure it out for myself. The windows rattle against the breeze and my toes are chilly even under socks, but Santana’s hand is warm and sure against my stomach. Every time she touches me I feel like someone’s boiling a bunch of soup underneath my skin. Santana sweeps into my mouth like she was always meant to be there. As much as I love the abstract bits of time, Santana is a fixed point.

I slip her shirt off so softly I don’t even think she notices. It isn’t until I’ve migrated firmly into boob territory that Santana seems to come to her senses.

“Britt, your family…”

“Is not home.”

“Okay.”

Santana smiles and motions for me to lift my arms. She pulls my shirt up, her body pressed as close to mine as it can be without getting in the way.

“I could have done that.”

“Next time,” Santana smirks.

“Next time,” I smile.

Santana kisses me again. Her hair tickles my cheeks and her thumbs rest behind my ears and I think her skin might be melting into me. “I love you,” she breathes, moving to kiss down my neck.

“I know.” 

“I’m probably going to say that a lot tonight.” 

“Okay.” 

“Can you say it back?” 

“Yes.” 

“Brittany…” 

“I love you. Yes, I can,” I smile. “I love you.”

/

Somehow we fall asleep again until the very late hours of the night, or early hours of the morning depending on how you define it. I’ll have to ask Santana where she falls on that topic. I want to know what she thinks about time. 

The smell of popcorn lingers in the air so my family must have come home sometime. The night has quieted down and my curtains can’t hide the moon, and when I roll over to get a better view, Santana is looking at me. 

“Hi,” she whispers.

I smile and prop myself up on my elbow. “Your lips look delicious right now.” 

“That’s all your fault.”

“I will _gladly_ take the credit. Aren’t you sleepy?” 

“I slept a little.”

“What else were you doing?”

“Thinking.”

“About what?" 

Santana pauses for a moment, then shakes her head. “No, it’s too cheesy. I can’t tell you.”

“It’s Christmas. You’re supposed to be cheesy.”

“No, _you’re_ supposed to be cheesy. I’ve got an aloof reputation to maintain.”

“I think I busted that one two orgasms ago.” 

She laughs, slow and satisfied. “It’s really, really pretty outside,” she finally says.

“I think I know what cheesy thing you were thinking, and the answer is yes. We should make some cocoa, too.”

I roll myself out of bed and root around on the floor for the clothes we discarded. My favorite pajama pants are just about on the other side of the room and I almost leave them there. But I walk the few extra steps after all; I already can’t wear these in front of anyone who isn’t Santana anymore. I might as well double down and get them all covered in snow.

When I turn back to Santana to tease her for being slow, my words get stuck somewhere near my collarbones. Santana is looking out the window, her naked back to me and my blanket covering her front. She heaves an enormous breath and I can see the worry lift off of her shoulders. 

I’ve never understood her more.

/

(Until about ten minutes later when she makes two mugs of cocoa for us and stops the microwave with one second left both times.

Santana couldn’t be less aloof if she tried.)

/

“Actually, we kind of need more snow.”

“It’s almost four in the morning and we’re already out here. We can make something, right?”

“Sure. I made some hearts at Quinn’s yesterday. Two days ago? Why does it feel like days don’t mean anything anymore.”

“That’s what winter break is supposed to feel like.”

“I guess.”

Santana squats down in the snow and rolls a ball until it’s just too big to hold in one hand. She smushes it tighter, stopping before it explodes, and then rolls another one. She keeps going until she’s got six balls and I can see a ring of grass around her. 

“Britt, I need more snow.”

“Well, I told you that already.”

“You’re supposed to be the expert at making snowmen.”

“Yeah, and in my expert opinion, we don’t have enough snow.”

Santana picks up one of her snowballs and lobs it at me. It breaks against my shoulder, trickling down my neck and underneath my shirt. I gasp and push her off balance, making sure she falls completely.

“It’ll snow more this season,” I promise. “We can try again.”

“Yeah?”

I reach across the snow, grasping her mittened-hand in mine. “Yeah.”

My dad likes motocross because he likes circles. Or, well, maybe the shape of the track is just an added benefit, but he definitely likes circles. They’re kind of like self-sustaining poetry. Every end is also a start and everything feeds into where it came from. Like how we all started as stardust and that’s where we’re gonna end. Snow was stardust and so we were we, and there’s always been snow. There always will be snow.

I think that means there will always be Santana, too.


End file.
